WCF Rest on Azure not getting Http Compression for JSON data

Question

Hi,

I'm trying to get my WCF Rest service working with HTTP Compression and already made several changes to my project, but nothing works.

I've added the following items to my Web.config file:

<system.webServer>
    <modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true"/>
    <urlCompression
    doDynamicCompression="true"
    dynamicCompressionBeforeCache="true" doStaticCompression="true" />
    <httpCompression
          cacheControlHeader="max-age=86400"
          noCompressionForHttp10="false"
          noCompressionForProxies="false"
          sendCacheHeaders="true"
          minFileSizeForComp="1">
      <dynamicTypes>
        <add mimeType="text/*" enabled="true" />
        <add mimeType="message/*" enabled="true" />
        <add mimeType="application/x-javascript" enabled="true" />
        <add mimeType="*/*" enabled="false" />
        <add mimeType="application/json" enabled="true" />
        <add mimeType="application/atom+xml; charset=iso-8859-1" enabled="true" />
        <add mimeType="application/xml; charset=iso-8859-1" enabled="true" />
        <add mimeType="application/xml; charset=utf-8" enabled="true" />
        <add mimeType="application/json; charset=iso-8859-1" enabled="true" />
        <add mimeType="application/json; charset=utf-8" enabled="true" />
        <add mimeType="application/atom+xml; charset=utf-8" enabled="true" />

      </dynamicTypes>
    </httpCompression>
  </system.webServer>

I've created a EnableCompression.cmd file, set it to copy always and added the following commands to it:

%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd set config /section:system.webServer/urlCompression /doDynamicCompression:True /commit:apphost
 
%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd set config /section:system.webServer/httpCompression /+dynamicTypes.[mimeType='application/json',enabled='true'] /commit:apphost
 
%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd set config /section:system.webServer/httpCompression /+dynamicTypes.[mimeType='application/json',enabled='true'] /commit:apphost
 
%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd set config /section:system.webServer/httpCompression /+dynamicTypes.[mimeType='application/atom%%2bxml;charset=iso-8859-1',enabled='true'] /commit:apphost
 
%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd set config /section:system.webServer/httpCompression /+dynamicTypes.[mimeType='application/xml; charset=iso-8859-1',enabled='true'] /commit:apphost
 
%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd set config /section:system.webServer/httpCompression /+dynamicTypes.[mimeType='application/xml; charset=utf-8',enabled='true'] /commit:apphost
 
%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd set config /section:system.webServer/httpCompression /+dynamicTypes.[mimeType='application/json; charset=iso-8859-1',enabled='true'] /commit:apphost
 
%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd set config /section:system.webServer/httpCompression /+dynamicTypes.[mimeType='application/json; charset=utf-8',enabled='true'] /commit:apphost
 
%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd set config /section:system.webServer/httpCompression /+dynamicTypes.[mimeType='application/atom%%2bxml;charset=utf-8',enabled='true'] /commit:apphost
 

And added a startup key to ServiceDefinition.csdef file:

    <Startup>
      <Task commandLine="EnableCompression.cmd" executionContext="elevated" taskType="simple" />
    </Startup>

But nothing works.

Can you help me?

Here is the Request and Response Headers:

Response Headers
Content-Length	135734
Content-Type	application/json; charset=utf-8
Date	Thu, 19 Apr 2012 17:00:45 GMT
Server	Microsoft-IIS/7.5
X-Powered-By	ASP.NET




Request Headers
Accept	text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Encoding	gzip, deflate
Accept-Language	en-us,en;q=0.5
Connection	keep-alive
Host	bbf1e5ef34174619a889ee7abbb52e97.cloudapp.net
User-Agent	Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; rv:11.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/11.0

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Answer 1

Hi,

Would you like to make sure that your startup task is executed in Azure VM? Do you have enable any Network Proxy?

From your situation, you mean "nothing works" and there's no exception message was thrown, try to use Azure Remote desktop to connect to Azure VM to see IIS configuration.

Hope this helps.

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Answer 2

Hi,

I changed a few things and now it works. First, I removed the settings from the web.config file and changed the EnableCompression.cmd to just this:

%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd set config /section:urlCompression /doDynamicCompression:True /commit:apphost
%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd set config  -section:system.webServer/httpCompression /+"dynamicTypes.[mimeType='application/json; charset=utf-8',enabled='True']" /commit:apphost

I think that the fact that I've used both methods, web.config settings and startup task, must be the cause of the problem.

---

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Answer 3

Actually, the reason that the .config file changes didn't work were because they were being made in the wrong file.  The web.config file doesn't control <httpCompression>, the applicationHost.config does.

Also, loading a configuration file and issuing the same commands via appcmd wouldn't prevent the .config file from properly being applied.  Depending on the commands issued, they might be deferred until an application pool, app domain, or IIS restart.