How to perform test to check whether WCF Response is compressed with httpCompression on IIS7+

Question

I am building test WCF Service (PersonService) in .NET 4.5 hosted on IIS 8 express. I also have installed dynamic compression on IIS. As far as I know WCF 4.0 onward compression is enabled by default. To enable httpCompression at service I have updated Web.Config as follows:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration>

  <appSettings>
    <add key="aspnet:UseTaskFriendlySynchronizationContext" value="true" />
  </appSettings>
  <system.web>
    <compilation debug="true" targetFramework="4.5" />
    <httpRuntime targetFramework="4.5"/>
  </system.web>
  <system.webServer>
    <httpCompression>
      <dynamicTypes>
        <add mimeType="application/soap+xml" enabled="true"/>
        <add mimeType="application/soap+xml; charset=utf-8" enabled="true"/>
        <add mimeType="application/soap+xml; charset=ISO-8895-1" enabled="true"/>
      </dynamicTypes>
    </httpCompression>
    <urlCompression doDynamicCompression="true" doStaticCompression="true"/>
  </system.webServer>
   <system.serviceModel>
    <services>
      <service name="PersonServiceLibirary.PersonService">
        <endpoint address="" binding="basicHttpBinding" contract="PersonServiceLibirary.IPersonService">
        </endpoint>
        <endpoint address="mex" binding="mexHttpBinding" contract="IMetadataExchange" />
      </service>
    </services>
     <bindings>
       <basicHttpBinding>
         <binding maxBufferPoolSize="524288000" maxBufferSize="524288000" maxReceivedMessageSize="524288000">

         </binding>
       </basicHttpBinding>
     </bindings>
    <behaviors>
      <serviceBehaviors>
        <behavior>
          <!-- To avoid disclosing metadata information, 
          set the values below to false before deployment -->
          <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="True" httpsGetEnabled="True"/>
          <!-- To receive exception details in faults for debugging purposes, 
          set the value below to true.  Set to false before deployment 
          to avoid disclosing exception information -->
          <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="False" />
        </behavior>
      </serviceBehaviors>
    </behaviors>
  </system.serviceModel>

</configuration>

Question: I want to verify whether the compression is actually happening or not. How can I verify that response is being compressed at server side before sending, also it is getting decompressed at client side.

Note: My client application is also .NET console application which is consuming above service. Both application Service and client running on same machine.

Answer 1

I used Teleric Fiddler check whether compression is happening or not. I have tried following things to check in which situation compression should work and where not. And fiddler didn't disappoint me.

1. When <urlCompression doDynamicCompression="false" /> it should not compress the dynamic response.
2. When <urlCompression doDynamicCompression="true" />, it should compress in any case unless <httpTransport decompressEnabled="false" /> is set. basicHttpBinding always send Accept-encoding="gzip,deflat" to server, to disable compression, we need to creating customBinding and set above property false.