Shaving seconds off page load times

IIS6 comes with some antiquated settings for Gzip compression.  Even after enabling it in the IIS management console nothing happens until you edit the metabase file to enable the files you really want to compress.

With the correct settings the main page for my site now loads in 5.3s instead of 6.0s and subsequent loads are now down to about 1second with just three requests to the server.

Browser caching and Gzip compression is improving our customer experience significantly now.

Here's what my metabase settings look like after removing 'asp' and adding 'aspx', 'cs' and 'js'.

HcFileExtensions="htm html"
HcScriptFileExtensions="aspx js css"

Don't forget to change both sections in the metabase, one for deflate and one for gzip.