I've been tasked with looking into performance tuning my company's intranet server. It runs DotNetNuke which suffers from poor performance. It also runs a number of other web apps (mix of asp and asp.net).
Could anybody give me a brief list of common performance tweaks that can be made to IIS6?
Why not profile the application and the database as I suggested in the answer I provided to the related question here:
Terrible DotNetNuke performance - Answer
Otherwise you won't know what to tune, you really need to get a full picture of how the app is performing and where the bottlenecks are. You can only get these metrics by profiling, perf counters and tangible data.
Related
My last project is a medium size asp.net web forms application. It is built using:
asp.net 3.5
ling to sql dbml --> sql server database (9 tables)
ext.net 1.6 (www.ext.net)
structuremap 2.5.3.0
This time I believed I did my best in terms of architectural design, code and data transfer optimizations. I followed all advice I could to work with the database efficiently through linq to sql and I built layers (model, repository, service, presentation) to separate concerns and lightweight the code in the aspx code behind files.
The problem is: I've installed the application in various web hosting servers with the same pitiful result: the application is struggling to work... pages are loading like in slow motion...
In the past I would say 'OK, I didn't do all I could to speed things up' but in this case I really tried to apply the best practices...
Is there anything else I can do about it? Or is it just asp.net for really small projects only?
thank you.
ASP.NET is fine for building large scale websites. As Brad mentioned, StackExchange sites are built using it, and StackOverflow is a very busy site indeed.
What you need to do first is measure performance; until you do that, you're just guessing at where the problem areas are.
So start with the browser - use a tool such as Firebug, or YSLOW, Google Chrome dev tools, whatever takes your fancy and run your site using the tool enabled. The tools can let you know how long things are taking to process eg requests, how long content is taking to download etc.
YSLOW will also give you some tips on anything it finds as being a bit slow e.g. you're making to many HTTP requests, you should consider minifying your CSS/JS files. You will get a general overview of how the site is performing and where problems could be.
To dig a bit deeper, use a tool like RedGate's ANTS Profiler, use the trial version and measure your website, and server side code, with that tool. There are other tools, though I'm not aware of any free ones.
My first question is that when its slow. Did you try your project in Local area network. Please check first there. If there slow then you need to improve little bit.
This slow performance depends on many things
such as large data load, multiple logic on one page etc.
Please let me know.
Thanks
Basit.
Last evening i was thinking that there are different view-engines in asp.net mvc like;
Spark
Web Forms
Razor
(i know the are differed syntactically as well but)
Do they effect the perfomance of asp.net mvc projects?
Let's say i would like to use "Razor" instead of Web Froms. So, will i get the performance hit? if yes. Please! explain.
Thanks in advance!
Yes, every choice you make in software development will impact performance. However, many choices don't make a noticeable difference.
Do you have a performance problem in your MVC app? Unless you can pinpoint Razor as the performance bottleneck, which is unlikely, don't bother.
Most performance issues in a web application are related to database queries, general network traffic, uncompressed static resources, etc.
Depending on your usage of each listed view engines (Spark, Web Forms, Razor) you may get potential performance problems.
Unfortunately, great tool ended to be not properly used, eventually turns to be a problem.
All in all, i will suggest to use the view engine that you and your team feel more comfortable with.
Basically, trying to be aware of options and mastering your tool base is the way for productivity and good performance.
I am on a project helping to analyze the load a VB.Net WinForms application can take. This app has been in production for several years and has many many products on it. We plan to add more products but see the client footprint rapidly increasing. This is contributing the degradation of performance on the system overall.
There is duscussion that moving the UI intensive portions of the app to ASP.Net it will reduce the client footprint and solve many of our issues.
My question which of the following will scale better in terms of performance and load?
- ASP.Net(VB) Web based architecture
- VB.NEt WinForms 3-tier architecture
Links to articles on the topic are also appreciated.
Additional Info
Client - Apparent issue is large memory footprint due to data caching (High cph utilization)
Middle Tier - web services that house BLC & DALC assemblies (Low utilization here)
Database - Multiple database that that serve data to the DALC via sprocs (Medium Utilization)
Deployment is not an issue, we have a very well developent methodology there.
Thanks in advance,
Freeon
Winforms will scale better than ASP.NET
B/c
a. when you use an ASP.NET client - (a Browser) you pay a price, html rendering - another price, Viewstate - a huge price.
about view state - it is a chunk of data that might grow more and more as long as you operate even on the same page.
You need to use special techniques in order to make a asp.net webform efficient (AJAX).
You don't have this on winform.
Anyway - a specific answer should be aware of your product functionality, architecture and design, so this is gust a general advice.
Not enough data...
In terms of a user interface a desktop application should out perform (by various measures) a web based one in all but the most trivial of cases - that's not to say that you can't produce a very decent and capable web application but even then Outlook Web Access is not Outlook on the desktop.
To further illustrate the point, look at the effort going into Silverlight and Adobe AIR which are attempts to provide desktop level capabilites with web level deployment.
So the question becomes one of asking what is it in the current desktop application that is causing the problem i.e. is it a deployment issue, a performance issue or something else?
If its deployment issue then that will suggest one set of solutions, if its a performance issue then things get a lot more interesting.
Either way, there is insufficient data to do anything other than generalise enthusiastically
With a web based application you can scale servers both up and out for both the web server itself and the database servers. I would think that a desktop based application would be somewhat limited in how much scaling can be done, along with the need to update each and every client installation when changes/bug fixes are done.
There are negatives about web based applications. They will live in a stateless enviroment, the UI maybe somewhat slower than a desktop installation. It is possible to create UI's that are very responsive using lots of Ajax/Javascript, but the development time for those RIA needs may be more than desktop development. Connectivity issues maybe be of a concern, along with user browsers and such.
Quick deployment though of updates is one huge benefit of a web based application. You only have to manage one installation rather than many.
Good luck with your project!
We recently had a web app that went out to site acceptance testing where they found severe performance problems related to request size (massive viewstate ASP.net).
We need to ammend our testing strategy to include performance testing, can anyone give us guidance on best practices please?
This is a very broad case to cover, but here are a few of the highlights of things that we do on a regular basis.
DO NOT just test on your network, get remote testing in. LAN connections are very fast, large pages and large load times can go by un-noticed. Ideally get to a place where it mimics the production location in regards to hardware and proximity/connection to the end user.
Use ANTS Profiler or similar tool to profile for expensive methods, and high memory usage.
Test with multiple users, to simulate load. Depending on the nature of the application also load test, either with multiple physical testers or with testing tools that allow you to simulate and script a load scenario.
Review the code to see if objects are retaining viewstate when they shouldn't need to.
I don't know a hard and fast set of "rules" but I find these are good starting points.
In addition to Mitchel's comments above I would recommend conducting load testing as part of your Continuos Integration (CI) process. Visual Studio Team Suite (Test Edition) contains a good load/stress test tool.
I think many developers know that uncomfortable feeling when users tell them that "The application is slow (again)."
In a complex web application there can be many possible reasons for a degradation in (perceived) performance: slow database response, bandwidth issues, bad caching etc. There certainly are issues which will never occur in a development or staging environment.
Now my question:
Is there a set of tools and/or methods which would provide a comprehensive "live" state on a IIS/ASP.NET/SQL Server production system in a visually way (not just performance counters):
Current HTTP requests (say the last n minutes)
Exceptions / timeouts
Bandwidth data
Number of open database connections / database calls
...
The primary goal is to see at a glance (or after looking closer) what problem is causing the performance problems.
I think the category of software you're looking for is ".net profiler" or ".net tracer". One such tool that you might consider is JetBrains' dotTrace. It gives you runtime stack traces and an array of counters that indicate possible bottlenecks.
Previously mentioned tools will certainly work. At our shop we needed finer information and built our own solution (long story: it was easier to code than to argue about tools and retrievable data).
I used LogParser to flip through the IIS logs and create output reports of those logs (e.g. result code breakdowns etc).
I used a combination of performance counters and WMI values to get the rest - you can read these using some pretty straightforward C# - this gives you full control that you can then dump to .csv etc for viewing/processing in excel or if you are updating a page as a control center.
I would probably also look at IIS.net as a great resource for IIS tools including debugging, security etc.
I followed urig's advice and found this software called SmartInspect.
Does anybody know this logging/monitoring tool? It seems to be a combination of real time console and developer library.
CLR 4.5 will have some new capabilities that will help you monitor ASP.NET performance live - without restarting your app. Basically you can re-JIT your code to include some monitoring-hooks in it, and then inspect time spent in classes/methods etc.
I'm sure dotTrace and other profiling tools will leverage this automatically, but it's worth checking out: C9 - Inside Re-JIT with David Broman