IIS 6 & Dynamic Compression!

Ok - this really got me! In my previous post, I spoke about the cool factor with regard to enabling compression. What got me was that our application dynamically generated Crystal Reports. Once I enabled compression, this feature broke entirely. It was a disaster. We had to roll back compression.

Looking at the code and everything else, I got nowhere! Finally, I decided to turn off compression for the those particular directories. Ohh...what a nightmare. As you can probably tell from my previous posts, I've always worked in the Apache-Tomcat/ Linux environment, and not so much in the IIS / Windows environment. Well....I got a crash course in understanding the Oh very flawed documentation on Microsoft's website (where they have disable instead of enable and vice versa for command examples - very confusing for a beginner let me tell you).

I tried running the adsutil.vbs script as suggested in the Microsoft docs directly

adsutil.vbs set /LM/W3SVC//root/directory1/directory2/DoDynamicCompression FALSE

This didn't do much. The compression was still taking place. Eventually though, it turned out that I had to make a seperate metabase entry for every directory that I didn't want to compress, since IIS had to get to it and after struggling with Metabase, I did the following.

For every directory I wanted to disable Dynamic Compressoin, I created a entry in the metabase.xml file.

<IIsWebDirectory Location ="/LM/W3SVC//root/directory1/directory2"
DoDynamicCompression="FALSE" >


You could use adsutil.vbs also to create the webdirectory and then disable dynamic compression
Adsutil.vbs create "/LM/W3SVC//root/directory1/directory2" "IISWebDirectory"
Adsutil.vbs set /LM/W3SVC//root/directory1/directory2/DoDynamicCompression FALSE

Ofcourse, if the directory requires any SSL or any such conditions, it may be lost. So, I checked the previous entries for the directories, and just copied it over instead of using adsutil.

Once I did that, it eventually stopped dynamic compression and things started running fine again. My Google searches led me to one author who actually said that there needs to be such an entry, and that was the "aaha" moment. It would have been nice for Microsoft to mention in their voluminous notes about this property, that IISWebdirectory needs to be created. In fall fairness, the Metabase property documentation did say "IISWebdirectory" but to a novice like me, I expected that if the "root" itself was defined as an IISWebDirectory, everything else would get picked up....


Well...that was my learning experience. Hopefully, the others who stumble upon this will have a less harrying experience then I have had!