Configuring gzip/deflate compression on IIS

An easy way to improve website performance, especially for low-bandwidth viewers, is to use compression to get the data to the user faster. The text portion of web pages (HTML, Javascript, CSS, etc.) compresses very well (90% or so) so the speedups can be significant. The user's web browser needs to support the compression method, this is done with the Accept-Encoding header that the browser will send to the server if it supports compression, for example, the major browsers support deflate and gzip: "Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate"

Static content can be compressed and then cached, only updating when the original files are changed, so it takes very little CPU usage to implement and it's pretty much a no-brainer to enable. Dynamic content (PHP, ASP.NET, etc.) can also be compressed, but since it is compressed separately for every request, it can take up significant amounts of CPU utilization.

Below is a quick guide to enable HTTP compression in IIS:

• Open up IIS manager and open up the properties for all web sites.
• Under the service tab, select the "Compress static files" and enter the value of the Temporary directory where the cached files will be kept. In addition, you should limit the temporary directory size to 1 GB or so.
  
• This will enable compression for .txt, .htm and .html files. However, .js and .css files can often be just as large as the HTML files.
• To enable compression for other extensions, you'll need to edit the Metabase. I recommend using Metabase Explorer for this. You'll need to edit the W3SVC\Filters\Compression\gzip\HcFileExtensions key and change it from "htm,html,txt" to "htm,html,txt,js,css"
• Now restart IIS to make the changes effective.

For more details, see the following url. This details how to turn it on for specific websites and other configuration options.

FFMPEG PHP installation on windows

We recently had a request from a client to install FFMPEG and the associated PHP module on a Windows server that was running Plesk 8.2 with PHP 5.2. This posed a bit of a problem because the FFMPEG project only releases source code releases, relying on others to make binary distributions. For linux distributions, it's usually in the package repository, but for windows, you have to dig around the internet until you can find someone that has compiled it for you, or you can compile it yourself. In addition, they refuse to go out of their way to make their code Windows friendly, which is fine, but it makes the process to compile it kind of complicated, since it doesn't work in Microsoft's C/C++ compiler by default, so you have to configure MinGW to compile it.

Finding a windows distribution of the main FFMPEG project was fairly easy. This site distributes binaries and also provides a very good guide on compiling it for yourself.

However, the PHP module is much harder. Especially since you have to find a module that is compatible with your version of PHP. Most of the available instructions point to PHP 4 modules, if you need a PHP 4 module, here is one good set of instructions. After much digging, I finally found a PHP 5 module here.

UPDATED: This link is now broken, we're currently hosting the PHP 5 module on our website here.

A complete set of instructions for completing this installation is below. My environment was Windows 2003, IIS 6, Plesk 8.2 and PHP 5.2.6:

• If you plan to use the FFMPEG command-line tool, download the binary package from arrozcru.org. Use a tool such as 7-zip to decompress it and expand the tar file where you want to place it.
• Download the zip file that includes the ffmpeg-php extension here and uncompress it. It includes several other software packages, you can ignore them, the files that we are interested in are in the ffmpeg-php-win32-all directory. UPDATED: This link is now broken, we're currently hosting the PHP 5 module on our website here.
  
• Copy the avcodec-51.dll, avformat-51.dll, avutil-49.dll and pthreadGC2.dll files to the c:\windows\system32 directory.
• Copy the php_ffmpeg.dll file to your PHP extensions directory. For me, this was "C:\Program Files\SWsoft\Plesk\Additional\PleskPHP5\ext"
• Edit your php.ini file and add the following bit. For me this was located at "C:\Program Files\SWsoft\Plesk\Additional\PleskPHP5\php.ini"
  
  extension=php_ffmpeg.dll
  
  
• If you are running PHP as an ISAPI filter, you'll probably need to restart IIS. I was running it as a CGI and I didn't need to restart.