How to track ASP.NET Webforms before Application_Start? - c#

I'm working on a legacy application built on ASP.NET Webforms and .NET Framework 4.6.2.
The application's initial page is very slow to start on my local machine and I'm trying to troubleshoot it. I put a breakpoint on Global.asax Application_Start method, and it's taking quite some time even before the breakpoint is hit. I'd like to know how can I track exactly what happens before the Application_Start event (what calls are made, external libraries used, etc.), from the moment I make the first request to the server, so I can get a starting point to improve the performance. Thanks in advance.

Well, while in VS create (or open) some aspx page with JUST hello world on it. Does that page take a long time to load?
And to be fair, create a brand new blank asp.net webforms project, and find out if that project also is slow to load.
In other words, this just might mean your computer is slow.
When you hit f5, then:
The project code is compiled. Then a bunch of information is "copied", setup, then configured for IIS to launch. Then a WHOLE web server is launched (IIS express), then the web page is loaded, and then IIS processes that page, and then it is rendered.
In other words, a BOATLOAD of startup stuff occurs. Once that WHOLE big web server is spooled up, then and only then does your application start and all that jazz start.
If you can navigate to another page (say from the menu bar (assuming your application has one), and then BACK to that supposed page that loads slow? Does that page load slow the 2nd time you hit that page?
If that is the case, then your computer might be slow, starved for memory, or even starved for processing to start up the WHOLE system of stuff required to run that whole web server.
if once the page is displayed, and everything runs normal, then this is not a slow loading web page, but in fact a slow load WHOLE web site, and in actual use and production of the system, then it not really slow anymore is it?
So, say if your computer only has 8 gig, and say a low or slow laptop processor, then startup of all the "enormous" moving parts required to run a whole web server system might be the issue, and NOT that the page load is really slow.
And since the production system will not be re-loading from 100% scratch each time a whole web server system, then you may well not have a slow system, but only a slow "first time" startup.
So, do other web site projects based on .net framework, and asp.net pages start out slow?
And is this a asp.net web site, or is this a asp.net web site (application) project?
So, quite a bit of "hand stands" will occur on first run and load of the web site. So, this could be your computer, and not really that the web site is slow.
Having stated the above?
I have some found web site projects RATHER slow to load, and this is especially in the case of a asp.net web site application. (as opposed to web site's, which tend to load a WHOLE lot faster - about 1 second, and the other was taking about 18-23 seconds on my old laptop (it was starved for processing).
On a older laptop, I was seeing about 18-23 seconds delay after hitting f5. On my newer laptop, I have about 2, sometimes 3 seconds delay from the time I hit f5 in code or markup to see the results and web site running.
So, often IIS has to be loaded and started, maybe SQL server started, and even more bits and parts. All of these things can take a LONG time on your dev box, but on a production server, all of those things are running all the time.
So, it not clear if you have a very slow web site, slow loading "specific" web page, or you just talking about the overall slow loading time for "any" first page to display, and then after that, everything is fine? In other words, it is f5 to start things going is the slow point in time.
And you didn't even note how long of a delay and time here?
Are you talking about 5 seconds, or 50 seconds?
Right click on your task bar, task manager.
Here is me hitting f5 on my laptop. Note the 6 cores go 100% max speed and power during that startup.
I do know that on my laptop, when I hit f5, then all 6 cores (12 threads) jumps about about 2ghz to 4 ghz, and all 6 cores are pinned for those 2-3 seconds while that whole web server is created, configured, and THEN started, and then the page in question has to load.
So, here you can see that hitting f5, the web page "starts" almost instant, and then about 4 seconds more.
(the processor usage is somewhat high - part of that is due to running the screen capture for this screen shot).
So, as "soon" as I hit f5, you can see the processor jump above 20%. I count about < 1 second for the browser to appear. Then about 4 more seconds. And the above is a slower to load page. And as soon as the page displays, then you see the cpu drop down.
As noted, try creating a new asp.net web site "application". A web site, they tend to load < 1 second. In fact above is the "by far" slowest startup I have. Most are about 1-2 seconds from hitting f5.
A asp.net web site application? They take longer - the whole site has to be compiled each time, and the .dll's have to be created.
Sometimes, it simple things like some virtual folder mapped to a location that does not exist (so on startup, a non existing folder or path name can take some time to "time out".
so, how fast does a new test project (create a new asp.net web site application (create a application, not a web site). I find that web sites load fast - even on computers with limited hardware.
However, asp.net web "applications" tend to load a WHOLE lot slower. (and thus more ram, and more cpu, and more cpu cores makes a HUGE difference in startup times).
Performance is a real art form in our industry. But, a few more details such as do all "application" sites start slow on your dev box, or JUST this one, and by how much compared to other sites.
Often, a delay can be network connection to a database, and say little or nothing to do with startup, but some network delay in say connecting to sql server which may well be some kind of network connection.
So, all first pages slow, or just one page?
does a new asp.net web site application (application is important here - not just web site) also startup slow? (if yes, then this is not specific to your site, is it???).
And using task manager - do you see high cpu usage during that startup (f5), or is it low? (this then suggests network and connection delays - not cpu and memory and performance issues.
So, a lot more trouble shooting here is required, but then again, we have little idea as to what testing you done so far, such as testing another web site application on your computer - and does it have things like authentication and sql server logon's involved.
I mean, we can have some issues with a car that will not start. So, we don't just yet swap out the engine, re-do the fuel injection system, and then ONLY to find out we forgot to put in a new battery, and that was the issue all along.
So, do a few tests - get some base-lines of say a test site - use one of the templates that has the "default" bootstrap menu, master pages etc. How fast does that start? Since if that site ALSO starts slow, then attempts at troubleshooting the existing site will be in vain, since all sites load slow - not just the "one" site your working on.

Related

Asp.Net Core Razor Pages Site Very Slow

I created my WebSite on Asp.Net Core and I hosted it on SmarterAsp.Net
http://greensaucegames.com/
I don't know what the problem is, if it was something I did, or if the hosting server is slow.
But the site is very slow, sometimes it doesn't even open the page I just clicked, the one from nowhere it reloads.
Does anyone know a way for me to try to diagnose what may be making it so slow and intermittent? How do you do it? Or some advice on how can I improve the speed?
Are Razor Pages really slow? Should I use something else?
I do use Blazor for the Admin Area, can this be interfering with the rest of the site?
Because your hosting subscription plan is very cheap. Use a high resources server will see acceptable performance.
I went to SmarterAsp.Net's homepage, and even IT loaded very slowly. I clicked on their "Why Us" link and watched in horror as a medium-sized image scanned in over about 15 seconds. The words "total garbage" immediately came to mind.
Then I tried to open one of your asset images in a new browser tab. Just the image itself, which is not a large one, took like 20 seconds to load.
Conclusion-- 100% chance that the shared hosting you have is the problem.
When I first put up a real business website, it took me quite a while to realize that shared hosting is a no-go. Even if the site works great at first, new users will come to that host, and soon enough you'll be stuck in glue again. Upgrading to "premium" packages and so on didn't help either.
Then I opened up my wallet, shelled out for an Azure Windows Server VM, and added a couple years to my life thanks to my immediate and total lack of stress. It's nice when everything just works.
There are many factors that make your site working slowly. For example
How effective is your code
How effective is your SQL query
Have you optimized your image
If you believe that you have optimized your site, then you need to check your external factors like your hosting provider. You may need to upgrade your plan to higher plan to get more stable server. Their hosting service is cheap but it might impact to your webiste performance. To test it, you can upgrade to higher plan. If your site still working slowly, you may need to find other hosting provider. I personally use Asphostportal.com and I can recommend them if you need .NET Core hosting.

ASP.NET MVC Slow start-up

Sometimes my MVC 4 application starts very slowly, but all the following requests come up quickly. It's running on IIS 8 and it uses Forms authentication.
The first start-up might take 20 seconds or so. I'm not 100% sure how long does it take to get a slow start-up again, but I guess it's more than an hour.
It's the same issue as described here:
MVC slow if site has been idle
So checking out the Application Pool recycling thing, I stopped the application pool, started it again, then browsed to the address, but it still came up quickly. I then ran the Powershell command (Get-Process -Id ).StartTime on the IIS, and it told me that last recycling for this application pool was when I started it.
I suppose that exludes the pool recycling?
The project is using Devexpress MVC layout, and I have removed all the assemblies/references that I don't need, but I didn't notice much difference afterwards.
The other applications on this IIS are made with Web forms, and they always come up quickly. The other applications also don't have the Forms authentication.
As a workaround I'm about to make a service that opens the address every 30 minutes or so, but still would be interested to figure out the real cause.
Any ideas?
Its may happen sometimes if configuration is not made properly.
You can use following techniques for improving performance.
1. Enable compression;
2. Optimize caching;
3. Optimize CSS;
4. Optimize HTML;
5. Optimize images;
6. Optimize callback management;
7. Optimize data management.
Please find a link here for more details how can we improve performance of website while using devexpress.
Devexpress support describes a lot about each small points regarding performance.
https://www.devexpress.com/Support/Center/Question/Details/K18541

Reducing time between starting an MVC web application and viewing the first page

Environment:
Visual Studio 2015 Update 1
IIS Express 10
Moderately sized MVC web application
.NET Framework 4.6.1 x64 debug builds
Newer Core I7 laptop, plenty of ram, SSD drive
Making a small change in one projects .cs file, hit the green arrow to test out the change. It takes about 8 seconds for the build to finish and Chrome to pop open a new tab. Not bad. But then it takes about ~30 seconds for the first page to show up.
What can be done to reduce that delay? Would pre-compiled views be the first order improvement here? What are some of the best current techniques to achieve that?
Try installing Glimpse. Correctly set up it will show you where the delay is including the database calls and their duration etc.
Install Redgate Ants and step through the code locally (potentially pointing at the production database if this is a live problem), this tool should be able to tell you where any slow down is.
One of the features is:
Jump straight to the slowest activity
The call tree in the .NET performance profiler shows you data for
every method and identifies the most expensive methods, database
queries, and web requests
There is a 14 day free trial, which should be enough time to diagnose your problem.

Azure web app have slow and unwarm loads (30s+ load)

I have a very big problem with an Azure Webapp and would like to hear suggestions.
What we experience:
When I goto our website it's quite fast. The average load is around 1 second and respond as expected.
However, once pr. 10-20 minutes, we get a very cold load - where it's 30-60 seconds+.
This would make sense if the website didn't have visitors and it was cold, but we have 10+ visitors online at the website all business hours with 3-5 requests pr minute at a minimum.
This extra load is completely unacceptable of course.
Any ideas?
Our setup:
We have two azure web-apps. One for production and one for develop.
The production is a "STANDARD SMALL", with auto scale when CPU hits 65-85%.
We database is S2 with 10 gb.
It's a quite simple standard ASP.NET MVC site with some texts, forms and a few remote connections.
The only "non-standard" is 3 million indexed pages that looks into a database (page load is around 1s). This receives a lot of visitors from Google. We also receive some crawls from Google as we have a sitemap with 3mio+ pages.
Data from monitor:
EDIT: data from new monitor.
Web-app:
Database:
The configurations:
Production web-app:
Database:
Our attempts:
1: Always on.
We have tried always on multiple times, but then sometime within the first 30 min to 6 hours, the site just goes down and doesn't come back**. This is of course a huge problem and is not a solution.
2: Running on a VM.
We have a pretty stable and fine setup on a VM on Azure (4gb RAM) which worked ok. We had quite slow responses, but it worked decent. However, we would like to use the web app to "outsource" the scaling and platform to Azure - we just cannot accept this speed :)
**
It goes unresponsive forever until a timeout. I have tried two scenarioes: one where stopping and starting web-app worked, a second where I had to do a redeploy
To help further isolate what the bottleneck is, could you please use the new Ibiza portal at http:portal.azure.com.
The older portal, screenshots above, is showing 54-minute averages. Obviously with 5-minute averages and the DTUs at ~80% there are likely to be periods where all of the DTUs are consumed and that could be the bottleneck.
Using the new portal, these DTU graphs are 15-second averages and this finer granularity could point to the bottleneck. Can you change to the new portal and paste some more graphs?
Thanks Guy
I found a solution.
The solution wasn't just in one place, but in multiple places.
Let me try to dive in.
The main challenge was the 3 million pages we have indexed. Google crawls between 50-150k pages pr day, which we could see in Google Webmaster tools:
99.9% Of these pages were a unique type of address pages. I dived into these, and found out these took 1.5-2s on default (!). It was even slow when running towards test.
Step #1 was to make a new index and optimize the code. 5x Performance improvement there.
Now, that doesn't solve the issue by itself. I also upgraded both the database to the new S3... Didn't solve issue totally (but still better).
I also upgraded our Azure Web App to the 7gb version - and THEN things started to perform.
However, we still had a small issue every 30th minute. I went onto our VM and found an old console job that kept some content in order.... I paused that job.
Neither of these findings could stand alone - but after all these were fixed - we're good again and website responds acceptable!
Hurray!

ASP.NET app longer on one machine than another (in IIS)

I have an ASP.NET app running in IIS. The first time a call to the application is made, it can sometimes take extremely long (e.g. 80 seconds), whereas the second time it's very quick
I know this has to do with the app first starting and possibly needing to gather resources etc. However, the problem is that I can run the same identical app on another machine and the load time for the first call is significantly less.
So I'm wondering what factors on the machine would affect this load time?
Thanks for any assistance
I agree with Steve's comment. FYI this slow response on initial request will happen every time the app pool has been idle for a while too. You can combat this by disabling the app pool from shutting down when idle. I think the default is 20 mins, this is a setting in IIS.
Then you will only suffer the problem every time the app pool recycles. You can stop this happening but I don't advise it. Interesting article on this here http://weblogs.asp.net/owscott/archive/2013/04/06/why-is-the-iis-default-app-pool-recycle-set-to-1740-minutes.aspx Recycling the app pool every now and again protects you from memory leaks. However you can pro actively spin up the app pool by setting up a scheduled task that runs a batch file to make a request to the website on detection of an app pool recycle.
This ensures that your site is always spinning and good to go for every request.
ASP.NET only compiles when the page is requested for the first time. This means that on first load the page is being compiled and then displayed. This can be solved by following the precompile instructions from Microsoft.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms227972%28v=vs.90%29.aspx
EDIT: I realized that I didn't answer the question that you were really asking.
There are a few things that could affect the first load:
1) The browser you are using may not be as efficient at displaying the type of content on the page (assuming different browsers).
2)If the machines aren't running on the same internet connection(and even if they are speeds vary between wifi/ethernet) this could be affecting the overall speed.
3)The specs on the machines themselves can be making a difference, browsers still take up resources to run, and as such a faster computer could display quicker (although it wouldn't make a giant difference).
4)You said the app was running on IIS, but you didn't specify whether it was a local (test) server or a deployed server. If it's local the specs of the machine again come into play, and in a giant way. Booting an IIS server, deploying the app and then displaying pages (what happens when you click run in VS or similar) can take very different amounts of time depending on the machine.

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