IIS 6 compression on Urlrewritten pages doesn't work

Question

I'm developing a asp.net site (running .net 3.5 SP 1) and using UrlRewriter.Net (http://urlrewriter.net/) for urlrewriting.

The site is hostet on a Windows 2003 server with all servicepacks and so forth.

It runs IIS 6.

In order to enable url rewriting I've setup a wildcard handler for *, which means all requests are sent through the asp.net engine.

I've also enabled IIS compression feature - this works fine when I use the non-rewritten urls. However it doesn't compress the rewritten pages.

I've added aspx, ashx and asmx as extensions to the metabase.xml, and set the proper compression level (9), etc.

The rewritten pages have .htm extension, so it shouldn't be because the extension is wrong.

Any ideas why this doesn't work ?

Answer 1

Probably because of the wildcard, IIS sends the request to ASP.NET, which further handles page generation etc. The compression happens to late in the pipeline, so it gets bypassed...

Answer 2

Unfortunately I haven't enough rep to leave comments.

If the issue is that compressions happens at the wrong time in the pipeline, I'd expect it didn't work for .aspx either (since everything is sent through the asp.net handler)

That being said, I guess it could handle .aspx earlier in the pipeline, as I believe the wildcard handler functions as a "last resort". Unfortunately on IIS 6 there is no changing the priority of handlers :-(

I guess I'll have to ask our administrator for a Windows 2008 server with IIS 7.