Programming Odds and Ends

I stumbled upon the Google Page Speed Insights tools  when testing ASP.MVC 3 site performance few days ago. After running the performance test, I found out that the web page I was testing has a performance index of 50% - i.e.things such as loading JS, CSS, and static files are taking away about half of the website loading time.  Here are some steps I took to optimize the site and recover much needed speed. Plan of Action 1- Enabling Gzip Compression Gzip  is a compression algorithm that is used by several web servers and browsers to send and receive compressed http responses. By default gzip is disabled on IIS (bummer ...). You could use IIS GUI to change the settings - but for those of you who are XML ninja's here are the few lines of code that will recover some speed for your .NET 4.0 /3.5 app running on IIS7. Code Snippet < system.webServer >    < urlCompression doStaticCompression = " true " doDynamicCompression = " true " /> ...