MVC Compression: How to use GZIP Compression in ASP.net MVC

Introduction

GZIP compression can help to our website to reduce its bandwidth usage. In this article, we can incorporate GZIP feature in our MVC app. We can enable GZIP header through our website, alternatively we can also enable GZIP through our website IIS. Here describing, how to use GZIP compression in our ASP.net MVC app.

Already Discussed on ASP.Net MVC Security & Performance

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Main benefits of GZIP compression are under below:

• It helps to reduce sizes of our website pages.
• It helps to increase speed of web pages.
• It mounts to cost-benefit ratio high.

Namespace:

We need to add two namespaces before to write code of GZIP compression.

using System.Web.Mvc;
using System.IO.Compression;

Code of GZIP Compress under FilterConfig.cs

Write this code under FilterConfig.cs in App_Start folder of your MVC App.

public class CompressAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute
    {
        public override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext)
        {

            var _encodingsAccepted = filterContext.HttpContext.Request.Headers["Accept-Encoding"];
            if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(_encodingsAccepted)) return;

            _encodingsAccepted = _encodingsAccepted.ToLowerInvariant();
            var _response = filterContext.HttpContext.Response;

            if (_encodingsAccepted.Contains("deflate"))
            {
                _response.AppendHeader("Content-encoding", "deflate");
                _response.Filter = new DeflateStream(_response.Filter, CompressionMode.Compress);
            }
            else if (_encodingsAccepted.Contains("gzip"))
            {
                _response.AppendHeader("Content-encoding", "gzip");
                _response.Filter = new GZipStream(_response.Filter, CompressionMode.Compress);
            }
        }
    }

Call Compress Attribute in MVC Controller

Now call Compress attribute on your controller action to get done this functionality in your MVC application.

Working Sample:

Here, I am showing statistics of my web page difference between zipped and unzipped webpage.

Unzip Webpage:

Unzip Webpage

Requests	34
Size	124 KB
Finish	5.33s
DOContentLoaded	617 ms
Load	689 ms

Gzip Webpage:

Gzip Webpage

Requests	34
Size	123 KB
Finish	1.36s
DOContentLoaded	523 ms
Load	582 ms

Finally, you can find difference between unzip and zip web pages. It is very required that your web pages should be Gzip enabled through IIS or visual studio project so that it will increase performance of your web pages in web browser (Chrome, IE, FF, Opera etc.). Here, I have explained how to use GZIP compression in ASP.net MVC app.

[Compress]
public ActionResult Index()
{
    /// write here your logic to pull data from database
    return View();
}

Conclusion

GZIP compression helps to our site pages and other resource files before sending them over to the program. This radically decreases exchange time since the documents are considerably littler. Here, I have explained how to use GZIP compression in asp.net MVC.

Suggested Reading

• ASP.Net MVC Page Life Cycle For Free
• Organizing an Application using Areas
• Asp.net mvc session management example