Who in the real world doesn't have some IIS web sites?
Recently a new(ish) piece of software came to my attention. Aptimizer. These guys recently joined forces (got bought by) Riverbed. Riverbed is a WAN optimiser.
Back to Aptimizer, the claim is that this little peice of software once installed can convert your IIS website, homebrewed or not, from a slow and painful experience (which takes a lot of developer effort :) ) into a blisteringly fast and fun one, with no developer involvement at all.
What?
I don't need to talk to the developers or the server team?? My site is just faster, despite the best efforts of the original web/server monkeys? How is this magic done?!
It's quite simple really. Taken from a browser perspective it is quicker to load less, larger items than it is to load lots of small ones. Lets take IE for instance, it may make 10 connections to your IIS site, each connection can download one item. A typical website may have around 50+ items it is pretty easy to do the maths. So IE has gotta work pretty hard tearing down connections and making new ones (although this doesn't always happen and can cause even more performance issues!)
So reducing the amount of connection required can produce faster websites. Couple this with whitespace and comment removal (comments? Do developers read these?! Your browser certainly doesn't!) which will shrink files further.
A pretty smart feature of Aptimzer is also Data:URIs this is the embedding of data (normally an image) into the HTML rather than sending an image file. Nice. Use this with sprites (group all images into one image, an uber-collage) and yet again more shrinking and reduced connections.
Not all websites work though. I've attempted this on a couple of sites I have, one of which is the System Center Operations Manager site. Not good. You can fiddle around with the settings but I'm an out of the bag kinda guy. So I haven't.
There is a special edition solely for Microsoft Office SharePoint Services sites. Which is pretty much the market they are going for, Microsoft even use Aptimizer for themselves it seems!
