Common performance issues on ASP.NET web sites

I spend a lot of my time analysing the performance of web sites and tuning the applications to make the sites run more efficiently and scale better. Over time I’ve pulled together a checklist of some of the more common performance issues that I see and how to resolve them, and I thought it was about time I shared them here.

Most of the issues I’ve identified are straightforward to fix (many are just configuration changes) and can give significant improvements to the scalability and the responsiveness of your web site. Some of them you may well already be aware of and I’m still amazed how many of the more obvious ones don’t get implemented as a matter of course, but then it keeps me in a job!

This post is broken down into three sections; the first is cold start improvements, or “why does my web site take so long to start up?”. This involves looking at what the IIS worker processes (w3wp.exe) are doing during initialisation, prior to completing the initial client request that caused them to launch.

The second section, which is generally more important, looks at the efficiency of processing requests once the server has “warmed up”, and is hopefully the state that the web site will spend most of its time in!

Finally the third section provides a general discussion around accessing SQL Server and web services from within web applications. These aren’t necessarily quick wins and may involve some changes to interfaces (or even the solutions architecture) to successfully implement, Finally, I’ll reveal the three golden rules for producing fast, scalable applications that I’ve derived from my investigations.

For each issue, I've included a brief description and references to where more information on the issue can be obtained and how to resolve it.

Cold start

• If the application deserializes anything from XML (and that includes web services…) make sure SGEN is run against all binaries involved in deseriaization and place the resulting DLLs in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC). This precompiles all the serialization objects used by the assemblies SGEN was run against and caches them in the resulting DLL. This can give huge time savings on the first deserialization (loading) of config files from disk and initial calls to web services.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bk3w6240(VS.80).aspx

Read more: MCS UK Solution Development Team

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