Hi Guys,

I've gotten DSC up and running in a 2k3 virtual machine and have begun stress testing the software. What I would like to know is if DSC is compatible with IIS's native compression (static&dynamic)? I'd like to see how much smaller the data can be reduced between server and client with using compression techniques, especially for the .axd script files which appear to be routinely downloaded per request.

Best regards,

LK

Yes, DSC works with IIS native compression. Our paid hosted editions are using the compression for both static and dynamic. Compression is definitely a big win. It gives you about 4 to 6 times smaller size for dynamic files (aspx, axd) etc. Don't turn on compression for image or media files since they are already compressed. You also might want to consider to put images or js directories into cache to speed up even more.

Anyway, the performance tuning is a bid topic. There are tons of things that you could do to improve your server performance. DSC supports SQL cache dependency natively. If you install both web server and SQL server on to the same box please make sure you limit the memory size that SQL server can use. Otherwise SQL server will allocate as much as memory it can get and IIS server won't have any chance to cache anything to save the unneccessary SQL connections.

Thanks for the feedback. It's great to hear that DSC has plenty more features available.

I took your advice on limiting SQL's memory usage as I am running both IIS and SQL on that same Virtual Machine.
I have noticed while stress testing the VM that SQL2005 is using up most of the CPU cycles, 90%, while IIS is left to use around 10%.