Random garbled web page in ASP.NET

Question

I have a site hosted on a dedicated server ( 2008 R2 IIS7.5 ) and every so often I get a garbled web page similar to the ones below. The entire screen is filled with garbage. There seems to no pattern to the issue and it happens to others as well. I could go for hours, maybe days surfing the site without seeing it though. They are all .aspx pages on the site. Any ideas?

HTTP/1.1 200 OK Cache-Control: private Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 Content-Encoding: gzip Vary: Accept-Encoding Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5 X-AspNet-Version: 4.0.30319 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2011 17:48:59 GMT Content-Length: 9874 ? ????? ?? I?%&/m?{ J?J??t? ? $?@ ????? iG#)?*??eVe]f @????{???{??;?N'????\\fd l??J??!??? ?~| ?"~??7N ??O?U????`@??P??????l9??T?L?????????C?7N?????? - snip -

HTTP/1.1 200 OK Cache-Control: private Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 Content-Encoding: gzip Vary: Accept-Encoding Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5 X-AspNet-Version: 4.0.30319 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET Date: Mon, 28 Mar 2011 20:23:42 GMT Content-Length: 10601 ‹ í½ I–%&/mÊ{ JõJ×àt¡ € $Ø @ ìÁˆÍæ'ì iG#)«* ÊeVe]f @Ìí ¼÷Þ{ï½÷Þ{ï½÷º; N'÷ßÿ?\\fd löÎJÚÉž!€ªÈ ?~| ?"~ãä7N ÿ®O¿^ämFãiWÛù/Z —Ÿ}tR-[j²ýæz• ”Nå¯Ï>jówí]À?L§ó¬nòö³¢©¶ î?ÜÞý(½{ô¸,–oÓ:/?û¨i¯Ë¼™çyûQ:¯óóÏ>ªó¦Z×Ó¼¹;mš»ôWÞŽé· Ò–zQàü÷"Ÿ A˜Öy¾|O - snip-

Answer 1

Without inspecting the server I would not be able to tell you much, because a lot of times you would just look for idiosyncrasies or differences in configuration.

All I can say - for what is worth - is that there seems to be something to do with the GZIP (and not the encoding), considering this is a new feature in IIS. Both cases have GZIP turned on. Now it could be that you have turned the feature on but I suggest turning it off for a while to see if it happens again. This could be in fact a bug in IIS.