I'm using google's page speed insight tool and on production, it works fine.
But is it possible to use it on localhost? or are there any equivalent tool for testing local pages?
I know the lighthouse tab is also an option but the metrics are somehow different! I need the same API used in that service!
You can use Lighthouse Command Line Interface (CLI) (or run it from NodeJS if you are familiar with that), this is the engine that powers Page Speed Insights.
That way you configure CPU slowdown and network latency to closely match how you experience Page Speed Insights.
With regards to Lighthouse in the browser, the metrics should be the same (in terms of what is measured).
If you are getting vastly different performance numbers there may be several causes such as:
plugins (so run in incognito mode)
latency difference (if your website is in India or Australia for example then the latency will be high using Google's servers in America so you will get better scores from localhost)
settings (not running "simulated" throttling).
You can find a bit more info on the Lighthouse CLI advantages in this answer I gave.
Related
I have a site that runs off of dotNetNuke with much customization. In production, this site runs fine, speed is relatively optimal, etc. In development, it's PAINFULLY slow (anywhere from 10-30 seconds per action slow). Can anyone recommend any tools/ideas on how to diagnose this issue? The environments are very similar (the dev database is not as powerful as the production one, but it's not enough to warrant this type of delay). I'm looking for something that can help determine all the points of contact for the requests, etc.
Any thoughts?
Try out the following tools:
YSlow: YSlow analyzes web pages and why they're slow based on Yahoo!'s rules for high performance web sites
PageSpeed: The PageSpeed family of tools is designed to help you optimize the performance of your website. PageSpeed Insights products will help you identify performance best practices that can be applied to your site, and PageSpeed optimization tools can help you automate the process.
Firebug and Network Monitoring: Look at detailed measurements of your site's network activity.
Fiddler
YSlow, PageSpeed, and Firebug are great tools you should definitely use but the fact that you're only seeing the issue in the development environment seems to imply it's not the site that's the problem but something with the development environment. Generally, I find most slowness in these cases is related to Disk and/or RAM issues. Use Task Manager to verify the machine has enough RAM for it's current load. Make sure there's sufficient available disk space for proper caching to occur. You may need a faster hard drive.
Run the site lokal in release mode and see if it changes something.
If you can run the live site in debug mode and see if it slows down as much as in the lokal environment.
All of my websites are hosted in IIS and configured with one application pool. This application pool consists 10 websites running.
It is working fine till today, but all of sudden I am observing that there is sudden up and down % in CPU usage. I am unable to trace out the problem.
Is there anyway to check which website is taking much load among all in the application pool?
Performance counters, task manager and native code analysis tools only tell part of the story. To gain a deeper understanding of what is happening inside your ASP.NET application you need to use WinDBG, SOS and ADPlus.
Tess Ferrandez has a great series of articles on tracking down what is to blame here:
.NET Debugging Demos Lab 4: High CPU hang
.NET Debugging Demos Lab 4: High CPU Hang - Review
This is a real world example:
High CPU in .NET app using a static Generic.Dictionary
You will probably want to separate your sites into individual application pools so you can identify and isolate the site that is causing the high CPU (but it already looks like you have a suspect so I'd isolate that one). From then you can follow Tess's advice and guidance to track down the cause.
You should also take a look at the logs to see if you're experiencing an unexpected spike or increase in traffic. Perhaps there's a badly behaved search engine site indexer nailing the site. If that's the case then maybe you need to (if you haven't already done so) create a robots.txt to prevent crawlers from indexing parts of the site that don't need to be indexed. On top of that if certain crawlers are being overly promiscious then just ban them. Perhaps consider a sitemap for google to tame and tune its activities.
If your server has reached it's max capacity, you will see CPU go up and down erratically because the GC will start trying to recover resources(cache..etc), which in turn causes your sites to work even harder. It's an endless cycle.
Have you been monitoring your performance counters? Do you have any idea what normal capacity is for your site? If you cannot answer these questions, I suggest you gather some perf numbers as soon as possible.
My rule of thumb is to always measure first, then make necessary changes.
Most of the time performance bottlenecks aren't where you think they would be.
There is really no performance counter way to tell, because the CPU counters are at the process level. Your best bet would be to do a time corelation with other events in the event log and .NET/ASP.NET counters for garbage collection, requests etc.
If you really want to go hardcore, you could use the SysInternals toolset to take snapshots of your app pool over time and then do a post-analysis to figure out what code was executed when the spike happened. Here is a related example from Mark Russinovich's blog - http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2008/04/07/3031251.aspx.
I'm getting close to finishing a public-facing ASP.Net app and I'm starting to weigh deployment options. I'm an ASP.Net/SQLServer veteran but noob when it comes to Azure. I'm wondering how others have felt about the learning curve to effectively migrate a local dev ASP.Net/SQLServer apps into Azure cloud.
More specifically:
How steep is the learning curve towards understanding administration and programming concepts, and do you think it's worth the investment?
What is Microsoft's support like if I have catastrophic problems from my cloud infrastructure and my live site is down? My expectation is a large price tag for a not-so-urgent SLA.
Will my non-Azure ASP.Net app require significant modification and/or coupling to run in the Azure environment?
Thanks
I answered a similar question a while back, here. Azure has evolved since then:
Azure's AppFabric Cache is currently in CTP (community technology preview) and will go live some time later this year (sorry, I can't quote a date). With a single configuration change, you'll be able to enable the asp.net session state provider without changing any code, and have your session state available to all of your web role instances.
With Azure v1.3 which rolled out in November, you have have the ability to run tasks at startup with elevated privileges (e.g. to run an MSI to install some prerequisite control suite).
For monitoring, you can take advantage of Microsoft System Center, which now supports Azure directly. Alternatively, you can look into 3rd-party options such as AzureWatch.
With Azure's extra-small instance, you can run a site for approx. $44 monthly. You mentioned catastrophic failures and SLA. With Azure, you need a minimum of two instances for SLA to take effect (this is because your virtual machines are located in physically different areas of the data center, in separate fault domains). So you're looking at approx. $90 / month to run a site with 99.95% uptime. Only you can determine whether this is worth it to you. Yes, you can host with a simple hosting provider for significantly less (such as GoDaddy). However, if your site fails there, you have to wait for it to be detected and then installed on a separate box. Also, you share each server with potentially dozens of other tenants, which will impact your site's performance. With Azure, at most 8 tenants will occupy a box, depending on how many cores you configure your virtual machines to use. And it's incredibly simple to scale up or down to handle traffic increases and decreases.
My personal experience is that there isn't much documentation and you have to search through blogs / forums to find answers for more advanced questions. If you have a nicely design app then there shouldn't be much problem with porting - you can google for Azure version of ASP.NET providers, ie. membership.
The biggest disadvantage may be cost: you have to do your maths but for me it turned out that a VPS hosting is much cheaper than Azure.
I would say that unless you get considerable savings on infrastructure don't move to Azure for just the sake of doing it. A hosted server with SQL and IIS will give you less problems and a bit more freedom.
I see an excellent answer by David Makogon already. The following might be helpful for you as well. The last episode of the Connected Show podcast was about migrating Wold Maps to Azure. If you are considering moving to Azure it is certainly worth listening to, as they explain the challenges they faced during the migration.
You could give a look at Moving Applications to the Cloud on the Microsoft Windows Azure Platform in MSDN.
Cheers.
It's one of those things I see a lot but never really think of. Do you think for the purpose of web application development (specifically ASP.NET WebForms/MVC). Do you think it's advantageous to do such a thing and if so, what kind of advantages come out of it?
By virtualization I mean using products like Hyper-V to separate the server context like your SQL and Web Server, etc.
First question is, virtualization of what? Do you mean server virtualization? Do you mean running VMWare on each dev's laptop with multiple OSes? Do you mean moving everything to the cloud?
Virtualization of servers, in web app context, is not really different from that in general IT - most of the servers on the Internet, including StackOverload's, are bought to handle peak loads and spend most of the time idling away the cycles, so virtualizing them makes sense when you have more than a certain amount.
VMWare on the desktop (or other parallels on other operating systems) is superb because a) your devs can run a full instance of your server environment, including multiple virtual servers connnected in a virtual network - this is about as close to the real thing that you can get, minus hardware costs and minus devs messing with each other's servers. For clients, you can use Linux and multiple Windows installs to test various browsers, font sizes, etc. quickly - also a big win.
Moving everything to the cloud makes sense in many cases, but is probably a topic for a separate full-sized question :)
One big advantage I see is, that every developer can have his/her own sandbox to work on. If someone messes up his/her sandbox he/she can take a clean image and all is OK again. So I guess that means that there is room to experiment without losing valuable time getting back to the normal setup, you can simply do a rollback.
I'm in doubt a bit on whether you should use virtualisation for production environments. Depending on the application of course.
The only time I would use a virtual for ASP.Net development was if the app required specific setup, such as relying on installed software, wierd settings or particular shares. Every developer has their own webserver and can run their own database so if it's a "basic" webapp I don't see much value in virtuals.. it's pretty hard to break anything with a basic web app deployment :)
With a virtual server, you can test your code in a production-like environment. It is also possible to quickly revert back to the original setup. For many applications, it is useful in that time period just after you write the code, but before it goes to production.
I'm a fan of virtualizaion and use it in testing and production (VMWare and Hyper-v) but over the last year I find it less important on a dev machine. TFS provides me with all the backup/rollback ability that I need, multiple versions of .net can now exist on the same machine and VS2008 can target all those versions.
In a development environment a virtual environment is useful to put several different servers on one box, you can have an instance for your web app, one for your services, one for database, etc. That way it mimics your production environment if you are using separate servers.
One of the benefits of using virtualization in production is that your application is not tied to a specific machine. If you wanted to move your web server instance to another box, it is trivial to do so. You don't need to install or configure things on the new server and hope that everything is set up properly.
One problem I have had though in testing virtual instances is that it can run slower for some applications, specifically engineering apps that like running the CPU at 100%. So test before you leap.
I am tasked with improving the performance of a particular page of the website that has an extremely high response time as reported by google analytics.
Doing a few google searches reveals a product that came with VS2003 called ACT (Application Center Test) that did load testing. This doesn't seem to be distributed any longer
I'd like to be able to get a baseline test of this page before I try to optimize it, so I can see what my changes are doing.
Profiling applications such as dotTrace from Jetbrains may play into it and I have already isolated some operations that are taking a while within the page using trace.
What are the best practices and tools surrounding performance and load testing? I'm mainly looking to be able to see results not how to accomplish them.
Here is an article showing how to profile using VSTS profiler.
If broken it is, fix it you should
Also apart from all the tools why not try enabling the "Health Monitoring" feature of asp.net.
It provides some good information for analysis. It emits out essential information related to process, memory, diskusage, counters etc. HM with VSTS loadtesting gives you a good platform for analysis.
Check out the below link..
How to configure HealthMonitoring?
Also, for reference to some checklist have a look at the following rules/tips from yahoo....
High performance website rules/tips
HttpWatch is also a good tool to for identifying specific performance issues.
HttpWatch - Link
Also have a look at some of the tips here..
10 ASP.NET Performance and Scalability secret
Take a look at the ANTS Profiler from Red Gate. I use a whole slew of the Red Gate products and am very satisfied!
There are a lot of different paths you can go down. Assuming a MS environment you can leverage some of the team system tools such as MS Team Tester to record tests and perform load testing against your site. These can be set to run as part of an automated build process.
A list of tools is located at: http://www.softwareqatest.com/qatweb1.html#LOAD
Now, you might start off simple. In this case install two firefox plugins: Firebug and YSlow for Firebug. These will give stats and point out issues such as page size, the number of requests made to get the page, etc. They will also make recommendations on some things to fix.
Further, you can use unit tests to execute a lot of the code behind to see what functions are hurting you.
You can do all sorts of testing if u have full MS dev system with TFS and Visual Studio Team Edition. Based on what I see here
I recently had a nice .Net bug which was running rampant. This tool sorta helped, but in your case, I could see it working nicely..
http://www.jetbrains.com/profiler/
Most of the time we've used WCAT from Microsoft. If your searches where bring up ACT then this is probably the tool you want to grab if you are looking for requests per second and the such. Mike Volodarsky has a good point pointing the way on how to grab this.
We use it quite a bit internally when it comes to testing our network infrastructure or new web application and it is incredibly flexible once you get going with it. And it seems every demo Microsoft has done for us with new web tech they seem to be busting out WCAT to show off the improvements.
It's command line driven so it's kinda old school, but if you want power and customization it can't be beat. Especially for free.
Now, we use DotTrace also on our own applications when trying to track down performance issues, and the RedGate tools are also nice. I'd definitely recommend a combination of the two of them. They both give you some pretty solid numbers to track down which part of your app is the slowdown and I can't imagine life without DotTrace.
Visual Studio Test Edition (2008 or 2010) comes with a very good load testing component for ASP.NET apps.
It allows you to get statistics for all the perfmon stats for a server (from basics like CPU and disk waits to garbage collection and SQL locks)
Create a load test for the page and run it, storing the stats in a database for the base line. Subsequent runs can be compared.