What Configuration Settings Affect the Performance of the Browser Interface?
Applies to: VC/m 2.4 onwards
When using the VC/m browser interface, there are two settings in Internet Explorer and IIS which can have a significant effect on the number of round-trip requests between the client and the server.
On a slow or loaded network or when accessing VC/m over a WAN or Internet connection, the number of round-trips can have a significant impact on the performance of the user interface.
Impact Analysis
This table summarizes the number of round-trip request /responses which were generated for a VC/m session with different settings:
| Test | IIS Content Expiration | IE Check for Newer Versions | Number of Requests |
|---|
| 1 | Enabled | Automatically | 82 |
| 2 | Enabled | Every Visit | 100 |
| 3 | Disabled | Automatically | 108 |
| 4 | Disabled | Every Visit | 1610 |
As can be seen, if page caching is disabled both within IE and on the web-server, performance can be particularly bad.
Recommended Settings
For best results you should enable content expiration on the web-server (the default setting of 1 day is more than adequate), and have your browser set to automatically check for new versions of the page (this is IE's default setting).
Updating VC/m
Following a VC/m update, if your browser clients previously requested the resource within the expiration period, they will not fetch updated files from the web-server. Some ways of dealing with this are:
- Disable content expiration sufficiently far in advance of the update to guarantee that all browsers will request new copies of files.
- Reduce content expiration. On IIS the minimum value is 1 minute.
- Tell browser users to empty their local cache before using the updated VC/m server.
Last reviewed: Sept 28, 2004
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