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Serve static content from a cookieless domain

While performance testing an Angular.js website, I ran the site through a few benchmarking tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, Yahoo’s YSlow, and so on…

One of the recommendations that these tools returned is ‘Serve static content from a cookieless domain’. Although there is some discussion going on if this recommendation actually makes sense, I spend some time reconfiguring IIS to get this working so I can measure the impact myself.

Here are the steps I took to get it working:

  • Inside IIS I configured 2 websites:

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    • A Default Web Site that listens on port 80 and has a custom host header configured(I used www.test.com as an example)

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    • A second website CDN that also listens on port 80 and has a different custom header configured(I used cdn.test.com for this one)

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  • For the CDN site, disable ASP.NET session state, this prevents cookies from being returned by ASP.NET.
    • Click on Session State.
    • Set the Session State Mode on Not enabled and click on Apply.

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  • Copy your static content(images, css, javascript) over to the CDN site
  • Inside your website, change the urls for the static content to point to the CDN site.
  • Run your application
    • If you look at the requests to the default website, you see that cookies are sent with the request:

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    • But if we look at a request to the CDN, no cookies are included:

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