Saving my users 3.5MB in downloaded data

Some may call it a micro-optimisation but I call it "pride in craftsmanship". Here's a little Azure config tip if you're hosting your app's web service there running ASP.Net MVC or WebAPI.

Simply add this to Global.asmx.cs

protected void Application_PreSendRequestHeaders()
{
  Response.Headers.Remove("Server");
  Response.Headers.Remove("X-AspNet-Version");
  Response.Headers.Remove("X-AspNetMvc-Version");
  Response.Headers.Add("Arr-Disable-Session-Affinity", "True");
}

If you're not running on MVC you can exclude the "X-AspNetMvc-Version" line.
If you need session affinity in your requests then you'll need to exclude the last line too. Hopefully you've built a nice stateless REST service API so it's not needed though. ;)

This allowed me to change the response headers from:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: private
Content-Length: 118099
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Server: Microsoft-IIS/8.0
X-AspNetMvc-Version: 4.0
X-AspNet-Version: 4.0.30319
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Set-Cookie: ARRAffinity=714c53d6b632a8f0cb8d9df96bafc60e300af0e3709b2c58e8e56273d9fc4120;Path=/;Domain=mir.azurewebsites.net
Set-Cookie: WAWebSiteSID=10eb484b1b294411b6aac209166dbe9b; Path=/; HttpOnly
Date: Thu, 12 Dec 2013 22:21:31 GMT

to:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: private
Content-Length: 118099
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Set-Cookie: WAWebSiteSID=cd9d0b49a2ea4f2986c535ed9bba9ea4; Path=/; HttpOnly
Date: Thu, 12 Dec 2013 22:46:15 GMT

Cutting out:

Server: Microsoft-IIS/8.0
X-AspNetMvc-Version: 4.0
X-AspNet-Version: 4.0.30319
Set-Cookie: ARRAffinity=714c53d6b632a8f0cb8d9df96bafc60e300af0e3709b2c58e8e56273d9fc4120;Path=/;Domain=mir.azurewebsites.net


That saves 206 bytes per request.
Now if the request is made by a periodic background agent that means the request will be made approximately 48 times a day, 365 days a year.

That adds up to 3524.53 KB per year. Not a massive amount but every little helps when saving users data.
I made this change as part of some other optimisation work (that I might eventually blog about) but thought it was worth sharing here as it's easy to apply to a wide variety of uses.