Question

I have an MVC application view that is generating quite a large HTML table of values (>20MB).

I am compressing the view in the controller using a compression filter

 internal class CompressFilter : ActionFilterAttribute
 {
     public override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext)
     {
         HttpRequestBase request = filterContext.HttpContext.Request;
         string acceptEncoding = request.Headers["Accept-Encoding"];
         if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(acceptEncoding))
             return;
         acceptEncoding = acceptEncoding.ToUpperInvariant();
         HttpResponseBase response = filterContext.HttpContext.Response;
         if (acceptEncoding.Contains("GZIP"))
         {
             response.AppendHeader("Content-encoding", "gzip");
             response.Filter = new GZipStream(response.Filter, CompressionMode.Compress);
         }
         else if (acceptEncoding.Contains("DEFLATE"))
         {
             response.AppendHeader("Content-encoding", "deflate");
             response.Filter = new DeflateStream(response.Filter, CompressionMode.Compress);
         }
     }
 }

Is there a way to also eliminate the (quite large) amount of redundant whitespace generated in the view before I run the compress filter (to reduce compression workload and size)?

EDIT:
I got it working using the WhiteSpaceFilter technique suggested by Womp below.

For interest here’s the results, as analysed by Firebug:

1) No Compression, no whitespace strip – 21MB, 2.59 minutes
2) With GZIP compression, no whitespace strip – 2MB, 17.59s
3) With GZIP compression, whitespace strip – 558kB, 12.77s

So certainly worth it.

Answer 1

This guy wrote a neat little whitespace compactor that simply runs a fast block copy of your bytes through a regular expression to strip out blobs of space. He wrote it as an http module, but you could take the 7 lines of workhorse code out of it and plop it into your function.