I found some wild remarks that ASP.NET MVC is 30x faster than ASP.NET WebForms. What real performance difference is there, has this been measured and what are the performance benefits.
This is to help me consider moving from ASP.NET WebForms to ASP.NET MVC.
We haven't performed the type of scalability and perf tests necessary to come up with any conclusions. I think ScottGu may have been discussing potential perf targets. As we move towards Beta and RTM, we will internally be doing more perf testing. However, I'm not sure what our policy is on publishing results of perf tests.
In any case, any such tests really need to consider real world applications...
I think this will be a hard question to definitively answer as so much will depend on A) how you implement the WebForms application, and B) how you implement the MVC application. In their "raw" forms, MVC is likely faster than WebForms, but years and years of tools and experience have produced a number of techniques for building fast WebForms applications. I'd be willing to bet that a senior ASP.NET developer could produce a WebForms application that rivals the speed of any MVC application- or at least achieve a negligible difference.
The real difference- as #tvanfosson suggested- is in testability and clean SoC. If improving performance is your chief concern, I don't think it's a great reason to jump ship on WebForms and start re-building in MVC. Not at least until you've tried the available techniques for optimizing WebForms.
It decreased one of my pages from 2MB payload, to 200k, just by eliminating the viewstate and making it bearable programatically to work with the submitted output.
The size alone, even though the processing was the same will create vast improvements in connections per second and speed of the requests.
I think that many of the people who think that WebForms are inherently slow or resource intensive are placing the blame in the wrong place. 9 times out of 10 when I am brought in to optimize a webforms app there are way too many places where the apps authors misunderstand the purpose of the viewstate. I'm not saying that the viewstate is perfect or anything, but it is WAY too easy to abuse it, and it is this abuse that is causing the bloated viewstate field.
This article was invalueable in helping me understand many of these abuses. https://weblogs.asp.net/infinitiesloop/truly-understanding-viewstate
In order to make a valid comparison between MVC and WebForms we need to be sure that both apps are using the architectures correctly.
My testing shows something between 2x and 7x more req/sec on MVC, but it depends how you build your webforms app. With just "hello world" text on it, without any server side control, mvc is around 30-50% faster.
For me the real "performance" improvement in MVC is the increase the testable surface of the application. With WebForms there was a lot of the application that was hard to test. With MVC the amount of code that becomes testable basically doubles. Basically all that isn't easily testable is the code that generates the layout. All of your business logic and data access logic -- including the logic that populates the actual data used in the view -- is now amenable to testing. While I expect it to be more performant as well -- the page life cycle is greatly simplified and more more amenable to web programming -- even if it were the same or a little slower it would be worth switching to from a quality perspective.
I think the problem here is that no matter how much faster ASP.Net MVC is than the old webforms, it won't make a difference, because most of the time taken is in the database. Most of the time, you web servers will be sitting at 0-10% CPU usage just waiting on your database server. Unless you get an extremely large number of hits on your website, and your database is extremely fast, you probably won't notice a big difference.
The only concrete numbers I can find which are from early ASP.NET MVC-development is on this forum-thread:
http://forums.asp.net/p/1231621/2224136.aspx
Rob Connery himself somewhat confirms statement that ScottGu has claimed that ASP.NET MVC can serve 8000 requests per second.
Maybe Jeff and his crew can give some kind of hint from their development of this site.
Contrary to the accepted opinion, optimized webforms usage completely kills MVC in terms of raw performance. Webforms has been hyper-optimized for the task of serving html far longer than MVC has.
Metrics are available on http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r7&hw=i7&test=db
Every single comparison mvc is on the lower-middle/lower-upper rankings of the list, while optimized webforms usage places in the upper-middle/upper-lower rankings.
Anecdotal but very serious validation to these metrics, www.microsoft.com is served by webforms not MVC. Does anyone here believe that they wouldn't have chosen MVC if it was empirically faster?
There's really no way to answer this. MVC uses the Web Forms view engine by default itself, and can be configured to use any number of custom view engines, so if you want a performance comparison you'll have to be more specific.
I started out work in MVC about a year ago, I was inspired but not impressed.
I loath the view state and see it as the root of all evil in terms of ASP.NET. This is why I just don't use it and to be perfectly honest why would you?
I took basically the ASP.NET MVC Framework concept and built that in my own way. I changed a couple of things though. I built my controller wrapping code, or URL routing code around dynamic recompilation.
Now, I would go as far as to say that ASP.NET MVC applications will be faster based on how you use it. If you completely abandon WebForms you'll be faster becuase the ASP.NET life-cycle and object model is humongous.
When you're writing you're instantiating an army... no wait, a legion of objects that will participate in the rendering of your view. This is gonna be slower than if you where to express the minimal amount of behavior in the ASPX page itself. (I don't care about view engine abstraction because the support for ASPX pages in Visual Studio is decent, but I've completely dropped WebForms as a concept and basically any ASP.NET framework due to code bloat or not being able to change the things that wire my application).
I've found ways of relying on dynamic recompilation (System.Reflection.Emit) for emitting special purpose objects and code whenever needed. The executing of this code is faster than reflection but initially built through the reflection service. This has given my MVC flavored framework great performance but also very statically typed. I don't use strings and name/value pair collections. Instead my custom compiler services goes in a rewrites a form post to a controller action being passed an reference type. Behind the scene there is a lot of things going on but this code is fast, a lot faster than WebForms or the MVC Framework.
Also, I don't write URLs, I write lambda expressions that get translated into URLs that later tell which controller action to invoke. This isn't particularly fast but it beats having broken URLs. It's like if you had statically typed resources as well as statically typed objects. A statically typed web application? That is what I want!
I would encourage more people to try this out.
The projects created with visual studio. One is mvc4 template, another is WebForm (tranditional).
And when make load test with WCAT, this is the result,
MVC4 is quite slow than WebForms, any ideas?
MVC4
could get about 11 rps
rps is quite low both 2-cpu or 4-cpu server
WebForms (aspx)
could get above 2500 rps
the performance killer has been found that it's a bug of MVC Bata or RC.
And The performance would be improved once i remove Bundles things. Now the latest version fixed this.
Performance depends on what you are doing... Usually MVC is faster than asp.net mostly because Viewstate is absent and because MVC works more with Callback than Postback by default.
If you optimize your webform page you can have the same performance as MVC but it will be a lot of work.
Also, their is a lot of nugets for MVC (and also for Webform) to help you to improve website performance like combine and minify your css and javascripts, group your images and use them as a sprite, and so on.
Website's performance depend greatly of your architecture. A clean one with good separation of concern will bring you a more clean code and a better idea of how improve performance.
You can take a look at this template "Neos-SDI MVC Template" which will create for you a clean architecture with lots of performance improvements by default (check MvcTemplate website).
I did a small VSTS load test experiment with some basic code and found ASP.NET MVC response time to be twice faster as compared to ASP.NET Webforms. Above is the attached graph with the plot.
You can read this load test experiment in details from this CP article https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/864950/ASP-NET-MVC-vs-ASP-NET-WebForm-performance-compari
Test was conducted with the below specifications using VSTS and telerik load test software:-
User load 25 users.
Run duration of test was 10 minutes.
Machine config DELL 8 GB Ram, Core i3
Project was hosted in IIS 8.
Project was created using MVC 5.
Network LAN connection was assumed. So this test does not account for network lag for now.
Browser in the test selected Chrome and Internet explorer.
Multiple reading where taken during the test to average unknown events. 7 readings where taken and all readings are published in this article as reading 1 , 2 and so on.
Related
I need help / advice on the below scenario.
We are planning to develop a web application which can handles millions of transaction per week with the below technologies.
1. WF4 for Work Flow definition / Business logic etc..
2. WPF for Application Design
Question 1:
We are also considering MVC3. Is it really necessary to use MVC3 with WF4 or we can go ahead with the traditional WebForms? We have absolutely no idea and we are confused. Ultimately we want to increase the developers productivity time by decrease the coding time.
Question 2:
Is it possible to use MVC3 with WF4? If so, please provide me some resources. There is very limited resources for this combo.
Your help is appreciated.
Performance in MVC is going to be better 'out of the box' so to say because of the lack of viewstate and the ability for lightweight responses using JSON.
If you are looking at a high performance site and aren't sure what to use - I would recommend MVC. There will be a slight learning curve but in the end I think you will be thankful you did. Unit testing alone is so much easier.
re workflow:
Since code can trigger off a workflow, you absolutely can use it. Just call your workflow, there's nothing special there.
The first google result for running from asp.net
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163623.aspx
You can expose your workflow via a service, call directly, etc.
I have a portfolio made in C#/ASP.NET which started off small but, as it is selling myself, it has grown in size very quickly.
I started off with using ASP.NET webforms model but this has meant that some of my code is in class libraries (.dlls) and some in page codebehind.
I want to fix this (no defined stucture), but without the overhead of migrating to ASP.NET MVC or WCSF.
How could I address these problems? I am thinking of moving all logic to WCF services and calling them from page codebehind. Is there a better way?
EDIT: The current problem is codebehind (used only as the site was small at the start but now it gets a lot of attention from me with updates). I want to seperate this all out so it's easy to test (what MVC addresses), and the coupling is generally low. Is it enough to use WCF to achieve this? What other techniques could I employ? Maintainability is another concern because maintaining a codebase split between .dlls is awkward (when debugging, as I noticed and mentioned in some previous threads).
Thanks
Unfortunately, traditional web forms applications are damn near impossible to test. WCF won't be of much help because it's a communications technology that will help you to get the data to codebehind classes but won't help you to render or test pages.
Due to this complexity, there are very few test automation tools, and the few there are are commercial paid-for products. One such tool I have heard of, but have not used personally, is Ivonna. You can also test using browser automation. Two great tools to help with this purpose are watin and WebAii.
This is, of course, dependent on whether you still want to keep the original code lying around. What I take in when I read your post is that you want all of the benefits of MVC. Unfortunately, it may be best to take the plunge and rewrite the application. It's painful, I know, but the sheer amount of hackery to make WebForms ape MVC concepts is overwhelming, to say the least.
I cant fully imagine what you need, but consider URL redirection / slug
We are going to develop a website in ASP.NET. So is it better to use MVC or web forms.
It depends on what kind of site you want to build and your knowledge and experience creating websites.
If you know your stuff and are confident in your ability to work "close to the metal" (as it were) I would imagine that you could build a faster website using ASP.NET MVC since you would be able to optimize your site to have as little overhead as possible. However it is more than possible to build a very fast site using standard ASP.NET as well so it really depends on exactly on the requirements of your project.
My completely unscientific opinion: Yes; ASP.NET MVC is faster than web forms.
ASP.NET MVC gives screen pops on the order of 1 to 2 seconds. Web forms is more like 3 to 5 seconds.
I don't know if they switched to ASP.NET MVC when they did the lightweight version of the MSDN library, but the speed improvement is similar to what I described. And let me tell you, the usability improvement is like night and day.
YMMV
Personally, I don't think there are big performance gap between asp.net mvc and web form. Because they actually employ the same underlying engine. In most cases, what makes performance a problem is how developers write their code, and the structure of the application.
Usually, people tend to compare mvc and web form on the elegance, maintainability.
http://weblogs.asp.net/shijuvarghese/archive/2008/07/09/asp-net-mvc-vs-asp-net-web-form.aspx
Web Forms and MVC each have their strengths. Web Forms typically has the familiar code-behind style of coding where you hook up a handler for something like a button click and write the code to handle it. MVC has a more separations of concerns style of coding and is generally more unit testable.
It all depends on your coding preferences and time required to deliver the project with respect to learning curves.
I would imagine this question has been answered a million times on this site an many other blogs.
One of the common questions asked regarding ASP.NET MVC is why should you use it over ASP.NET Web Forms? The answer generally includes ViewState and clean URLs, amongst others. Towards the end you'll find a blurb about using the right tool for the job and that they serve different purposes. However, I don't believe I've ever seen what those purposes are. So, when would you actually choose ASP.NET MVC over ASP.NET Web Forms, or ASP.NET Web Forms over ASP.NET MVC?
You don't choose ASP.Net MVC over ASP.Net, because ASP.Net MVC still is ASP.Net. You do choose ASP.Net MVC or ASP.Net Web Forms, and there are lots of good reasons to do that:
Easier to get control over your HTML
Easier to do unit testing
Few "Gotchas"
On the other hand, Web Forms do have a few points in their favor:
Easy to put simple CRUD/business apps together extremely fast
Hard to beat ViewState performance in local LAN environment
Easy to learn forms paradigm
The result is that if you're building business apps in a corporate LAN environment (which honestly is still most web developers), Web Forms is really great. In that sense Microsoft really knows their market. But if you're building an app for the public internet, you might want MVC so you can test thoroughly and be sure your pages aren't bloated with unnecessary ViewState or JavaScript data.
Additionally, something that has changed over the last several years is that even many corporate intranet applications now need to support home/remote use, making MVC more attractive to that crowd than it had been.
Use MVC if all your team members are skilled enough to manage "control over HTML", otherwise your code will turn into a tag soup.
In other words
bool useMvc = true;
foreach (TeamMember member in team.Members)
{
useMvc = useMvc && member.IsSkilled;
}
http://weblogs.asp.net/shijuvarghese/archive/2008/07/09/asp-net-mvc-vs-asp-net-web-form.aspx
check that blog !
Bottom line "separation of concerns"
I'll give you a couple purposes, with clear advantages.
If your purpose is a public facing website that will be banking on traffic, use MVC. It is optimal for search engine optimization.
If your purpose is an enterprise web-application that acts like a desktop app, I would lean towards web forms, since state management and compartmentalization of your resources into underlying server controls offers huge advantages if used correctly.
The biggest problems facing developers is managing complexity and keeping code "clean". MVC gives the developer the reins to leverage OOP to tuck away complexity and make code easy on the eyes.
Webforms will be faster to develop in the short term, but it doesn't lend itself to long term sustainability in terms of maintenance and growth.
I've worked with Web forms for 13 years and MVC for 2 years now and when I started with MVC, I had similar questions. Here are my takeaways.
Most importantly: ASP.NET's latest release is 4.6 and they were moving to ASP.NET 5.0, but MS abandoned that for ASP.NET Core, which no longer supports Web Forms (or even VB.NET). So, that alone might give you your answer when deciding what rabbit hole to go down.
That being said:
MVC I'm finding, once you get the hang of it, is WAY easier for dealing with basic forms and any sort of simple "Model", aka tables with a very simple, straight-forward set of relationships such as orders that have tables that link to users, products, etc. Once you start getting into some more complicated relationships and need to return lots of conditional sets of results, rely on parameters, have complicated stored procedures... then Web Forms is much better for dealing with this. If you don't have to deal with this level of complication, MVC makes development SO MUCH faster, especially with dealing with an approach where you already have the DB because it creates so much of the code and validation for you already
If you're not very experienced with database design, MVC does the work for you. It can literally build the database for you.
MVC doesn't have a lot of the built in controls that Web Forms does (Gridviews, FormViews, Sitemaps, Paged lists). Everything has to be written from scratch, but luckily a lot of people have already invented that stuff for you in NuGet which you can just download into your project
MVC relies heavily on the structure of your URL. The path, the querystring, etc. If you find your application needing to do a lot of form POSTing instead of GET-ting, you're going to have to do a lot of tweaking or AJAX posting. If you have a set URL that can't change, it can be a pain. It's doable, but just a little tricker (or you can just use Angular instead).
MVC has no Viewstate. If you need to hide variables from post to post and persist them, it's a little difficult. MVC Does have things like ViewBag which lets you pass data from your controller to your page, but it clears after the page is rendered. There is also something called "Tempdata" which acts like Session state, but more temporary. However, it relies on Session State which is not an ideal way of persisting data. Session variables and tempdata variables are fine for user-level data (profile information for the person logged in), but having two different tabs open by the same user can cause these session/tempdata variables to overwrite each other when you're dealing with the actual model data.
If you're at a crossroads, I'd go with MVC. MS is pushing it and support for Web Forms will likely start going away
Last week at Mix '09, the final version of ASP.NET MVC 1.0 was released.
Some of the stated benefits of this framework are:
Clear separation of concerns
Testability - support for Test-Driven Development
Fine-grained control over HTML and JavaScript
Intuitive URLs
Now, Microsoft are being careful to tout this as being "an alternative, not a replacement, for ASP.NET Web Forms", but given the advantages mentioned above, I'm wondering:
How long will it be until "classic" ASP.NET Web Forms is considered to be a "legacy" framework?
If you were kicking off the development of a new .NET web project today, why would you choose to use Web Forms instead of the ASP.NET MVC offering?
Good questions. I think ultimately, the answer is going to be the development team's expertise and the project needs that will decide that. ASP.NET web forms is so heavily used that it likely isn't going away anytime soon. Plus, there are so many custom controls and third-party support such as components and books. The main benefit of web forms is how easy it is to get a dynamic website up and going. It really is a RAD way of developing websites.
However, once that team has more experience with creating larger websites with much higher demands in terms of scalability, reliability, and test-ability, then they will look towards other solutions for that. In this case, they will realize that web forms are harder for unit-testing. They may also see that viewstates reduce performance and look for possible solutions.
Although MVC has the stated benefits, it is unlikely that anyone will convert their sites to use this new framework right away or ever. Plus, it requires the team to learn the new technology, and work out the new bugs. The team will have to learn new ways to do the exact same thing. For example, how easy is it to support uploading a file using MVC?
As I saw recently, there isn't a reason you can't create a site using MVC and web forms together. So you may see more hybrids in the near future. But I doubt that web forms will ever go away.
I kind of think about web forms like the way VB1 changed the way Windows applications are created on the desktop. To this day, the RAD way of creating application still exists and will never go away.
Keep in mind that MVC STILL uses WebForms for it's default View Engine. Sure, you can replace it with another one, but WebForms is still a core part of it.
Also, not everyone prefers to tightly control the HTML or the Routing. That's not my attitude, but some people just want their job done with the smallest effort.
And aren't .asmx Files technically part of the "old" Model as well? I can say for sure that a lot of people would not like to see them go away.
Still, I personally see ASP.net MVC becoming the main Web Engine for ASP.net in the future, although not in .net 4.0 yet.
You're asking when a newly-released web platform, ASP.NET MVC, will replace Web Forms, which has been around for seven years.
If we'd been crying out for ASP.NET MVC for the past seven years, then it wouldn't have taken seven years before ASP.NET MVC was released. The fact is, not everyone sees a need for this. Many of us have been creating complex, highly-scalable web applications for most of those seven years.
We even knew how to make them testable, and to separate presentation from business logic and data access. ASP.NET MVC may enforce this separation, but I've done it by using coding standards and code reviews, and by saying, "there's no unit test for that", and "get that business logic out of the UI".
Also, if I really needed more control of the HTML, I would write my own control to generate the HTML.
I do not believe WebForms will ever retire.
I've been using WebForms at work in business applications and MVC at home for some private things. Though I really like MVC I do not see how this could be possible to implement really complex UI logic with HTML/CSS/JavaScript. It will quickly become unmanageable and will be quite unsecure since JavaScript can be switched off to prevent disabling some controls or hiding some information. On the contrary, turning off JavaScript with WebForms will virtually turn the page dead for any action, either authorized or not.
Both platforms will continue to evolve. For general web sites and HTML/CSS lovers MVC is a way to go, with complex applications you would want object-oriented architecture and artificial event handling even though it abstracts you from the stateless nature of HTTP.
So, pick up what is best for you.
P.S. Dropping WebForms altogether will jeopardize the future of numerous projects and companies throughout the world. Microsoft folks would not want to become an object of hatred and the trigger that started the third world war.
WebForms will still have a place for those that want a pseudo-stateless web application that they can easily put together by dragging and dropping. For those that don't have to or want to understand how HTTP works. It's the ultimate in RAD for web applications.
ASP.NET MVC on the other hands allows much more finer control at the cost of more responsibility. You get complete control over your HTML however that means you have to sanitize/encode your output yourself. Your application for the most part has to be completely stateless and for some ASP.NET WebForms/Windows WinForms developers that it's a bit hard to wrap their mind around.
I don't think either will ever dominate the other though one may be favored.