YSlow using IIS?

YSlow using IIS? 07 Aug 2007 14:56

Indeed!

Recently Yahoo put out a developer tool to snap into Firebug called YSlow. It analyzes a given web page and generates a marked score for a number of "performance traits" of the site. If a page can be improved, YSlow gives some tips on what can be improved.

The other day Simone put up a horrid post listing my blog as having a D ranking?!? What the...

So I had a nosey to see what he was on about and low and behold, there were definitely some areas for improvement.

Ok - so thats better! Maybe I should migrate to Akamai?

If you are using IIS 6 like me, you are likely to be failing on a couple of the rules:

3. Add an Expires header (for resources such as CSS/JPG)

This one is fairly easy. Browse to the directory holding your resources, select the properties, select the HTTP Headers tab and then enable Content Expiry. Set a number of days sometime in the future (e.g. 30).

4. Gzip components (for resources such as JS/CSS)

Firstly enable GZIP by right clicking on the Web Sites folder and selecting the Service tab. Check the appropriate boxes. I normally just enable static file compression.

Next edit the Metabase.xml in %windir%\system32\inetsrv (you will need to enable Direct Metabase editing for this on the properties for the top level node in IIS Manager)

Find the section named HcFileExtensions (there will be 2 of them) and modify them to include any static resources you want compressed.

Mine looks like this:

HcFileExtensions="htm
            html
            txt
            js
            css"

You will need to do an IIS reset to finish off and you might want to disable Direct Metabase Editing as well :)

13. Configure ETags

This one on the face of it is quite annoying, that is until I found this article! Compile the code using Visual C++, or just download a binary version.

You can install it into IIS by adding a new ISAPI filter (either at the Web Sites level or to a specific site), it will show as unknown initially, which is fine. Make sure you allow the filter to run by adding it as the same name into the Web Service Extensions and set the extention to be allowed.

You will need to do an IIS reset to finish off.

And done! Your site now should be much better off to deal with that impending Slashdotting :)

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