GZip compression with WCF hosted on IIS7
- by joniba
So I'm going to add my query to the small ocean of questions on the subject.
I'm trying to enable GZip compression on large soap responses from a WCF service. So far, I've followed instructions here and in a variety of other places to enable dynamic compression on IIS. Here's my dynamicTypes section from the applicationHost.config:
<dynamicTypes>
<add mimeType="text/*" enabled="true" />
<add mimeType="message/*" enabled="true" />
<add mimeType="application/x-javascript" enabled="true" />
<add mimeType="application/atom+xml" enabled="true" />
<add mimeType="application/xaml+xml" enabled="true" />
<add mimeType="application/xop+xml" enabled="true" />
<add mimeType="application/soap+xml" enabled="true" />
<add mimeType="*/*" enabled="false" />
</dynamicTypes>
And also:
<urlCompression doDynamicCompression="true" dynamicCompressionBeforeCache="true" />
Though I'm not so clear on why that's needed.
Threw some extra mime-types in there just in case.
I've implemented IClientMessageInspector to add Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate to my client's HttpRequests. Here's an example of a request-header taken from fiddler:
POST http://[omitted]/TestMtomService/TextService.svc HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/soap+xml; charset=utf-8
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Host: [omitted]
Content-Length: 542
Expect: 100-continue
Now, this doesn't work. There's simply no compression happening, no matter what the size of the message (tried up to 1.5Mb). I've looked at this post, but have not run into an exception as he describes, so I haven't tried the CodeProject implementation that he proposes. Also I've seen a lot of other implementations that are supposed to get this to work, but cannot make sense of them (e.g., msdn's GZip encoder). Why would I need to implement the encoder, or the code-project solution? Shouldn't IIS take care of the compression?
So what else do I need to do to get this to work?
Joni
