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IISxpress 2.3.2 is now available. This is a minor release which includes the following enhancements:

To download IISxpress 2.3.2 click here.

For all recent IISxpress news click here to view the news feed or here to see the press releases.

IISxpress 2.3 is now available. This release contains the following enhancements:

New Features:

• Performance counters
• Faster startup on complex web sites

Bug Fixes:

• Now correctly handles pre-encoded content on IIS 7
• Fixed a stability issue seen on IIS 6

To download IISxpress 2.3 click here.

The following screenshots show the new performance counters in IISxpress:

The screenshot above shows the Windows PerfMon tool displaying the IISxpress performance counters for DotNetNuke, Community Server and Umbraco installed on the same web server.

The screenshot above shows the Add Counter dialog in the PerfMon tool. When IISxpress ISAPI is selected the available IISxpress performance counters and instance names are shown. You can view the IISxpress performance counters from any computer by entering the name of the IISxpress server in the Select counters from computer drop down list and then selecting the counters to view.

IISxpress 2.2 is now available, here is a quick rundown of the new features:

• The Status Window General tab now shows the number of compression cache hits alongside the other stats.
• Responses that were served by the compression cache are now shown with blue text in the history trace window.
• Selecting a response in the history trace window now allows you to specify exclusion rules based on that response, you can exclude its extension, content type, location and many other things.
• The console application now allows you to exclude individual files from compression. For example you can tell IISxpress to not compress just the file /images/banner.jpg and allow all other files in that directory to be compressed.

36 of the top 50 web sites in the world (top 50 according to alexa.com) use HTTP compression to improve the performance of their web sites - so what is holding you back?

These very high usage figures were a surprise even to us - but the message is clear - if HTTP compression scales to meet the business needs of the most popular web sites on the planet then it certainly can have an impact on your internet/intranet web site too.

The figures break down as follows:

• Top 5: 100%
• Top 10: 80%
• Top 20: 75%
• Top 30: 73%
• Top 40: 72.5%
• Top 50: 72%

We believe that IISxpress is the best compression solution for IIS 5, 5.1, 6.0 and now 7.0. The good news is that you can use it non-commercially for FREE, otherwise you can evaluate it for 21 days with no obligation to buy.

The full list follows (1 denotes compression detected):

Our next release of IISxpress, version 2.1, will now be available for FREE for all users of Windows Vista, Windows XP Professional and Windows 2000 Professional.

Now all workstation users can run the best compression solution for IIS for absolutely nothing - no catches, no unwanted advertising, no spam, no spyware, just 100% of the performance and 100% of the featureset of the full product.

You can download the beta version of IISxpress 2.1 from the download area of our web site.

So, you need to be convinced by HTTP compression or you are just curious what impact it has on download speed? Just for you we have created two demonstration web pages so you can see for yourself what an improvement to the end user experience compression makes.

These two test pages demonstrate, side by side, a download of uncompressed and compressed data. Using JavaScript the pages time each download and print the result of the test on the screen. The compressed download should win each time since the data actually downloaded is significantly smaller than the uncompressed data.

The test data for Test1 is approximately 423KB in size, Test2 is bigger at 3.2MB.

• Test 1
• Test 2

When you run the test your browser will request identical data from two different directories on the web server. IISxpress is configured to only compress the data from the compressed directory. IISxpress will compress this data on-the-fly, while passing through the uncompressed data in its original form. 

We recommend that you use Internet Explorer to perform the test since it will reliably retieve the test data from the server when you press CTRL-F5 to refresh the page. If you hit just F5 or select refresh from the menu the content will be loaded from your browser's cache rather than from the web server.

Files this large are not too typical of web site content, however for a single page with many different asset files (JS, CSS, images, etc) the size of the total page can be a lot bigger than just the HTML. So overall it's a close approximation of the real world user experience.