Hello all;
I've built a large scale single page enterprise app. It conducts virtually all service transaction using AJAX requests, and data transfer is primarily JSON.
We recently implemented dynamic compression for JSON and XML in IIS. This gives us gZip encoding for our JSON data packets, and greatly reduces the size of our transfers across the wire. Because of the data requirements of our app, we really have to do this or hourly operational costs will simply be too high.
We have, however, hit a snag: in IE, when an AJAX callback returns data that is compressed, there is a total hang in the UI process while the content is handled. It appears to me that this is happening during the decompression of the callback data. Why decompression would happen in the same thread as the UI I don't know, but that certainly appears to be the case.
What I'm looking for is a way to work around this, as it is quite disruptive. Assume you have an app that polls for data in the background perhaps every 30 seconds. If that data set is compressed, and IE hangs for 2 seconds at each decompression event, then you wind up with a product for which the UI becomes unresponsive for 2 seconds every 30 seconds. It's not acceptable.
Has anyone confronted and found a workaround for this sort of behavior?
Thanks - all comments and insights welcome.