Professional ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX

16.6. After Deployment

The application has been developed and tested, the predeployment checklist has been satisfied, and deployment is completed. Now it's time to keep an eye on things and consider what changes might be necessary with the application running in the real world. You will need to monitor performance counters and consider other configuration changes to satisfy production demands.

16.6.1. Performance Monitoring

As you monitor the performance of a deployed ASP.NET application, it is key to understand that performance is really a complex balancing act. Incoming requests can be handled very quickly if the content is cached. However, caching content increases the memory consumption and can put additional pressure on the system to page memory to disk. And caching implies that the output sent for any single request is only as accurate or up to date as when it went into the cache. Some content that is customized based on unique user input may not be cacheable and may truly require that dynamic results be produced. This becomes even more complex when you add that the application is running in a garbage-collected environment that is periodically preempting other work in order to clean up unused memory and add and remove worker threads in a self-tuning effort.

You can gather some data from Windows performance counters on the server in order to monitor how it is running, using the Perfmon tool that comes with Windows. Don't focus entirely on a single performance metric. In ...