The Microsoft Internet Information Server holds the site web pages. A customer requests a page either static or dynamic HTML, ASP, XML, style sheet etc. The server first determines if the customer has a compatible browser. It then pushes down a compressed version of the page to the client. The customer’s browser then decompresses the file and displays it. Only the compressed version of the page is sent. The compression process requires a slight increase in CPU utilization for compression/decompression both on the server and client side. Up to 1/10 of the original file size with virtually no additional processor load. Content is compressed prior to SSL encryption and sites employing SSL also reap significant performance increases.

PipeBoost’s core is an ISAPI (Internet Server Application Programming Interface) Filter written for and tested with Microsoft IIS versions 4.0, 5.0, 5.1 and 6.0. IIS World Wide Web service is still utilized to serve the web pages, but with PipeBoost installed, they are served in a compressed form. The filter utilizes a widely used and proven compression library -- zlib by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler.

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