ASP.NET Site Performance Secrets

Chapter 3. Memory

Along with the CPU, memory is a critical hardware resource that directly affects the performance of any program running on a web server. When it comes to generating web pages using ASP.NET, a shortage of memory reduces performance for two fundamental reasons:

• It forces the server to swap data out of memory to the swap file on disk. This not only increases CPU usage and disk I/O, but also slows down data access because accessing data on disk is much slower than accessing data in memory.
• It prevents you from using caching, a powerful technique that trades off increased memory use for improved performance. Caching is discussed in Chapter 5,Caching

The quickest and cheapest way to overcome memory problems may be to simply add more physical ...