I just implemented this IIS Compression article on some business applications we’re delivering over a low bandwidth connection and it reduced. Interesting enough if you simply enable IIS compression as explained by Microsoft and a couple hundred other sites then you do HTTP analysis on how your Siverlight Business App is performing you’re going to see zero improvements. As explained in the article I listed above the Siverlight Business App template with RIA Services will be sending data over the wire in binary by default so it’s already improved. However this type isn’t compressed by default when you enable IIS compression so you’ll need to add the appropriate MIME type to the application host configuration file. Namely you’ll have to add this dynamic type:
add mimeType=application/msbin1 enabled=true
I can’t express enough how much this improves the performance of the requests to the application. Our app made many requests that returned 50-100Kb of data. Shrinking that by 80-90% per request was huge for how the application responded in the field. Compression is a must if you’re going to use RIA Services in a similar situation.
