As you might know, I am running the French .NET portal Tech Head Brothers and I am always searching for good way to optimize it and make it run better.

Following the post of Jeremy Zawodny’s blog: “How To Add Good Expires Headers to Images in Apache 1.3“ I decided to check this on my server running Tech Head Brothers on IIS 6.0.

You can read more about the way to configure this option on technet “Using Content Expiration (IIS 6.0)“.

After several tests I must say that yes it increase the performance of the site. I used the wonderful httpwatch 4.2 to run the tests.

The other optimization I did in the past:

  1. added compression to the site to optimize the load time of all the ASP.NET AJAX and Control Toolkit scripts and the page html
  2. modified the site to use less external files, I had multiple css files so migrated to almost one
  3. usage of the AJAX Control Toolkit - ToolkitScriptManager