Real World .NET 4, C#, and Silverlight®: Indispensible Experiences from 15 MVPs

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ASP.NET Performance

by Bill Evjen

It is one thing to know how to build an ASP.NET application and get everything working as you want. It is another thing to get it working well. As you build web applications today, you must also ensure that the choices you make in the construction of the application also work well with regard to the overall performance of the application.

As your web application takes on more user load, you have options for how you want to deal with the growth. The choices you have can be made either via the code of your application, or via actual hardware changes.

This chapter covers a lot of different ground, but all the items mentioned here have a direct impact on the overall performance of your ASP.NET applications.

This chapter includes discussions on how to deal with state management and caching. Also touched upon are hardware considerations and configuration for your server. Finally, this chapter covers how to monitor your application's performance, because this will help you fine-tune what is wrong, or what could be improved.

LOOKING AT HOW ASP.NET HANDLES PAGE REQUESTS

Before starting on some of the items you can do to your applications to help with performance, it is first important to understand how ASP.NET handles page requests. ASP.NET compiles your ASP.NET pages (.aspx) as they are referenced (for example, by an end user in the browser).

When an ASP.NET page is referenced in the browser for the first time, the request is passed to the ASP.NET parser ...