Is RadCompression a good or bad idea for Sitefinity?

I had never actually used RadCompression (part of the RadControls) before, but kinda stumbled upon it yesterday and was wondering if it's good or bad idea to use it with Sitefinity?

For those unfamiliar with RadCompression, as I kinda was "RadCompression is a HttpModule that is shipped with the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX and is designed to automatically compress your AJAX and Web Service responses" (http://www.telerik.com/help/aspnet-ajax/radcompression.html)


I've tried and enabled it for a sitefinity dev build, a 4.2.1650 Prof edition with about 20 pages in the tree. Browsing/Clicking around in the backend I notice nothing out of the ordinary, all seems ok. And fiddler seems to indicate that transport is now gzip compressed when calling a service so that seems to work. (Without Radcompression, transport is not compressed) 

When loading the page overview on the dev environment I notice that the PageService.svc call (pulling down 20pages) is compressed from 12Kb to 2Kb so definately seems to work, but I can't 100% verify any increase/decrease in performance. I just used it on a small test site and not on a data heavy project.

So I was wondering if maybe someone from Telerik could provide some insight in wether it will increase performance or not and wether it's safe/advisable to use or not... 

Jochem.

Hi Jochem,

The compression will improve the client side performance,because as you noticed files are much smaller. The only drawback is that compression consumes some CPU power but you'll hardly notice it.

Regards,
Pavel
the Telerik team

Sweet thanks!

Just something to check, but we had trouble with RadCompression, Firefox 11, and serving PDF files from a database provider. We may have had something else misconfigured, but regardless, it is something to verify.