How to enable IIS compression for WCF services?

Question

I currently use a custom gzip encoder for my WCF service. I want to replace it with the built-in IIS 7 compression if that is possible. I can\'t find info online on how to t

Answer 1

It seems you can enable Dynamic Compression in IIS via the GUI or CLI.

This article shows you both ways:

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/EnablingDynamicCompressionGzipDeflateForWCFDataFeedsODataAndOtherCustomServicesInIIS7.aspx

I found the GUI way easy. The article shows you how to confirm it is working with Fiddler.

Cheers!

Answer 2

I had the same problem; .aspx pages were compressed but WCF content wasn't. It has to do with the content type returned by the WCF service, which got appended to the mime-type.

I got it to work with the following section in the ApplicationHost.config:

<dynamicTypes>
    <add mimeType="text/*" enabled="true" />
    <add mimeType="message/*" enabled="true" />
    <add mimeType="application/*" enabled="true" />
    <add mimeType="*/*" enabled="false" />
</dynamicTypes>

Here's what I did (most of the same steps as mentioned already):

• Install the Dynamic Compression Role Service for IIS role
• Enable Dynamic Content Compression for the website that you use to host the WCF service
• Open %SystemRoot%\system32\inetsrv\config\applicationhost.config and add the relevant content type to the section of the
• After this it still didn't work.
• I checked the data with Firefox' Tamper Data and noticed the content type returned was actually "application/xml; charset=utf-8".
• After adding the complete content type, including the "; charset=utf-8" to the section, it worked:

<add mimeType="application/xml; charset=utf-8" enabled="true" />

As I felt that the character set encoding should not be determining if the compression works or not, I ended up letting IIS compress all application/* content types.

Answer 3

Perhaps it depends on the specific WCF service setup you are using, but for the applications I have used it in (all were mixed access for both .NET applications and Silverlight pages), the generated WCF client class contained an EnableDecompression property that can be set to true. After that my Winforms apps send the correct headers and the webservice communication is correctly compressed.

Answer 4

This is useful for IIS 6

http://ramon.bloggingabout.net/2008/11/06/wcf-and-http-gzipdeflate-compression-and-silverlight/

(updated URL)