HTTP handler to combine multiple files, cache and deliver compressed output for faster page load

hosting on cloud servers, medium trust problem

Amir — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 08:34:42 GMT

Dear Omar ,

I had a problem with uploading on medium trust servers , is there a way to change this ?

Javascript optimization in big web apps

GianfrancoTodini.com — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 10:27:09 GMT

Javascript optimization in big web apps

re: HTTP handler to combine multiple files, cache and deliver compressed output for faster page load

Kar — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 02:00:39 GMT

Hi Omar,

I got to this post because of some problem in IIS 6.0. Any why my handler is not receiving accept encoding header when the site was hosted on IIS 6.0.

Thanks.

Minify

Steve Clay — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 19:07:57 GMT

If you have also have PHP5 installed, Minify is another (arguably) more mature and flexible option with the same goals/features as HttpCombiner.

@Hardik: "Enable Content Expiration" only sends the Expires/max-age headers with each request. This is a good first step but HttpCombiner/Minify also reduce the number and size of the requests.

re: HTTP handler to combine multiple files, cache and deliver compressed output for faster page load

Hardik — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 11:12:51 GMT

Hi,

Whats the difference between HTTPCombiner and option we get in IIS under HTTP Headers - Enable Content Expiration ?

re: HTTP handler to combine multiple files, cache and deliver compressed output for faster page load

kushin — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 03:24:48 GMT

@ghbn: make sure you put the httpcombiner in the root folder and have it referenced /HttpCombiner.ashx

re: HTTP handler to combine multiple files, cache and deliver compressed output for faster page load problems Page in sub folder

ghbn — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 07:09:29 GMT

This cod have problem if your page in sub folder

re: HTTP handler to combine multiple files, cache and deliver compressed output for faster page load problems in DNN

ghbn — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 06:24:32 GMT

I use in Dotnetnuke and in home page is work good

but in other page not work!!!!!!!!

work only in Home page of portals

you can help me?

re: HTTP handler to combine multiple files, cache and deliver compressed output for faster page load

kushin — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 09:30:47 GMT

Hi Omar,

In the HTTP-Combiner.zip file, I noticed that the t query-string is in the script tag is

mistyped as "t=type/javascript" instead of "t=text/javascript", not a big deal and the page still works but note to others who might use

Ctrl-C+Ctrl-V like me :D

re: HTTP handler to combine multiple files, cache and deliver compressed output for faster page load

kushin — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 09:22:52 GMT

For those who are getting errors in Safari/Chrome, that says:

Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected token ILLEGAL in the Chrome Inspector

As seen here: www.codeplex.com/.../View.aspx and here

www.mail-archive.com/.../msg01628.html

1. Make sure there are no illegal characters - trial and error - I put comments

like //start of file1.js //end of file1.js

2. I also noticed that multi-line js comments like /* */ are no go when you plan to combine those files

using the http-combiner.

re: HTTP handler to combine multiple files, cache and deliver compressed output for faster page load

Dhruv — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 21:12:08 GMT

This doesnt work under medium trust apps. Is there a way to rectify that ?

re: HTTP handler to combine multiple files, cache and deliver compressed output for faster page load

Khurram Shehzad — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 18:18:16 GMT

Hi,

If you declare your theme in your configuration file the framework automatically registers all the css files inside theme folder. What could be done in this case without breaking the overall structure of the theme directory and implementation?

thanks in advance.

regards,

re: HTTP handler to combine multiple files, cache and deliver compressed output for faster page load

Asrar Malik — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 15:33:39 GMT

It is too gooood

thans

re: HTTP handler to combine multiple files, cache and deliver compressed output for faster page load

aswad32 — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 23:39:57 GMT

hallo omar, thanks a lot for this kind of solution, you really help me, figure it out how i can improve my tons of javascript loading. you are great dude.

great from malaysia

re: HTTP handler to combine multiple files, cache and deliver compressed output for faster page load

cibrax — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 15:21:14 GMT

Hi Omar,

The module does not work exactly how I expected. The browsers are not caching the content using the URL, they are basically sending a conditional get to the server with two headers "If-Modified-Since" and "If-None-Match", when the server returns a "304 Not Modified" code, then they used the cached version (Local). Otherwise they always download the file content from the server. You can repro the issue using the firebug pluggin in Firefox. Altough you serve the files content from the ASP.NET cache in the ashx handler, the browser is still hitting the server all the times and downloading the content, it is not using the cached version on the browser side, so the cache is only working server side. Thanks

re: HTTP handler to combine multiple files, cache and deliver compressed output for faster page load

omar — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 07:22:23 GMT

I suggest you use an IFRAME inside your main page that does the long running task. So, the postback happens on the IFRAME and the IFRAME takes a while to load. DUring this time, you can show progress bars on the parent page. When IFRAME loads, it can call functions on the parent page to disable the progress bar.

So, before post, inside the IFRAME, you call parent page to show some progress.

window.parent.showSomeProgress();

Here showSomeProgress() is a function on the parent page.

When the postback is complete, the iframe loads and calls:

window.parent.hideSomeProgress();

Again, this is a function on the parent page.

THe progress function can hide the IFRAME and show some animated progress bar in the same place.

re: HTTP handler to combine multiple files, cache and deliver compressed output for faster page load

ASPdev — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 11:29:04 GMT

I have an asp.net application (no ajax though) where i currently pull data from a remote data server using normal sql command etc.

I pull all the required data once and keep it locally for future reads.

The web page communicates with the remote dataserver through a classic (xml) web service.

Since the call to retrieve data is taking time, the web application does not show the post back page quickly.

I want to move to a model where i can spawn an activity in the behind to gather the whole data in chunks while the page displays temporarily the "currently processing" message.

Would WCF help me here vis-a-vis xml web services "async" type calls?

Sorry if this question did not fit in well in this blog post, but i thought i will put it anyway since it is related to performance issue.

Thanks.

Regarding my previous post about problems in FF3

Nikolay Raychev — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 07:58:49 GMT

I was pretty sure that there is somthing with encoding.

I made the following change:

private byte[] GetFileBytes(HttpContext context, string virtualPath, Encoding encoding)

{

if (virtualPath.StartsWith("http://", StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase))

{

using (WebClient client = new WebClient())

{

return client.DownloadData(virtualPath);

}

else

{

string physicalPath = context.Server.MapPath(virtualPath);

using ( MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream() )

{

using ( StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter( stream ) )

{

string content = File.ReadAllText( physicalPath, encoding );

writer.Write( content );

writer.Flush();

return stream.ToArray();

}

//byte[] bytes = File.ReadAllBytes(physicalPath);

// TODO: Convert unicode files to specified encoding. For now, assuming

// files are either ASCII or UTF8

//return bytes;

}

Now the problem dissapeared.

I don't know why everybody tells that FireFox was a good browser. I'm always having problems exactly with Firefox and no other browser.

re: HTTP handler to combine multiple files, cache and deliver compressed output for faster page load

nhm tanveer hossain khan (hasan) — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 17:45:07 GMT

hi mishu bhai,

this is very nice topic. we have been using the same technique but it automatically happens after every fresh deployment.

our process is kind of like this -

our system merged all similar files (lets say all css files) and all merged files are minified through jsmin and cssmin.rb through command line execution.

and store in a public directory, so our front reverse proxy server can serve them directly instead of knocking our application process.

since our server compression is enabled so we didn't need to worry about rest.

as you mentioned it gain some performance, we also believe so. since browser requires less connection to fetch all scripts.

as i see you have *aspx file which set the header and related stuffs. in our case we let our server do it for us(nginx). since we can configure server to serve different file and extension in different ways.

btw, thanks for bringing such an important topic.

Problems in FireFox 3

Nikolay Raychev — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 14:08:31 GMT

Hi Omar,

Your tool is really great. We will be using it to combine some CSS files in the next release of SilverlightShow. It works fine under most browsers but I'm having problems in FF3. For some reason FF does not recognize the content of some of the combined files.

I have disabled caching on all my browsers. When I move the desired styles in another file FF recognizes them. It happens exactly for the last appended file. I'm sure that caching is not the problem because when I open the combined css file in another tab the styles do exist. May be there is somthing with encoding. I'll make some more research and let you know what happens.