ViewState Compression

Recently, I developed a huge ASP.NET page, with more than 30 controls. As we all know, it's a good idea to disable the ViewState for the controls that don't actually need it, say Literals or Labels. After doing that, I noticed that the hidden ViewState field was still a few KBs big. This is obviously a big problem for the users that still don't have a broadband connection, because uploading 40 KB to the server is really a bad issue, especially when they begin to click the "Submit" button again and again because they don't notice any response. So, after a few searches through the Internet, I got a code which compresses viewstate and therefore save a rough 50% of the bandwidth.

Performance and Conclusion:

I noticed that the ViewState has been reduced from 38 KB to 17 KB, saving 44%. Supposing you have an average of 1 postback per minute per user, you could save more than 885 MB of bandwidth per month on every single user. That's an excellent result: you save bandwidth (and therefore money), and the user notices a shorter server response time.

I wanted to point out that this solution has a performance hit on the server's hardware. Compressing, decompressing, encoding, and decoding data is quite a heavy work for the server, so you have to balance the number of users with your CPU power and RAM.

Reference URL: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/viewstate/ViewStateCompression.aspx