You can achieve a substantial improvement of the performance of SlxWeb by making sure the static data gets cached, and the compressible data gets compressed. There are some instructions on how to do that in the Saleslogix documentation but unfortunately they are incomplete and inaccurate so here are a few steps you want to make sure you take:

• Obvious first step – make sure the <compilation> tag in web.config has debug=false (which it is by default, but we often turn it to true while developing). Leaving it to true will turn off some of the caching options.
• Enable compression in IIS – in addition to the steps outlined in the doc (right click on “Web Sites”, go to Service, check “Compress static files” and “Compress application files”), run the following:
  • Start a command prompt and go to \inetpub\adminscripts
  • To ensure aspx and axd (web resources) are compressed, and to ensure the DLL aren’t (which would mess up mail merge), run (on one line):cscript adsutil.vbs SET W3SVC/Filters/Compression/gzip/HcScriptFileExtensions asp aspx axd asmx ashx
  • Also run this one (same thing for the deflate algo): cscript adsutil.vbs SET W3SVC/Filters/Compression/deflate/HcScriptFileExtensions asp aspx axd asmx ashx
  • To ensure Javascript and css are compressed, run: cscript adsutil.vbs SET W3SVC/Filters/Compression/gzip/HcFileExtensions js css htm html txt
• Go to the properties of the “jscript”, “css” and “images” directory, go to Http Headers, turn on the content expiration
• Restart IIS. Test with fiddler or a network capture tool to make sure it is working.

I should mention that these apply to IIS 6 only. Thankfully I have only had to set up SlxWeb on one Windows 2000 server so far.

ALSO, important note for SLX 7.5.2 and above. The extension for the mail merge is ashx so if you use the above recommendation it will get compressed which will break it (on IIS6 – no such problem on IIS7 as they use content type, rather than file extension, to decide what gets compressed). Here is one way to get around that:

• Create a dummy “SLXMailMergeServer.ashx” on your web site
• Set a property on it in IIS. For example the expiration header. Does not matter what – you just want to get that file to come into existence in the IIS metabase
• Then run: cscript adsutil.vbs SET W3SVC/1/root/SlxClient/SLXMailMergeServer.ashx/DoDynamicCompression false (of course the exact path would depend on whether you are running on the default web site or not… you could use the metabase explorer too)