ASP.NET MVC vs WebForms: speed and architecture comparison

Question

I had an argument with one of my friends who is an architect at a pretty large internet company. Basically he was saying that ASP.NET MVC is not for large-scale enterprise applications, that it is not as flexible as WebForms, and that an MVC app will be slower than a web forms app.

From my own experience working with MVC, I can say that it is more flexible and it is lighter weight because there is no page life cycle, viewstate, etc.. It should thus load faster at the very least. As far as I know, MVC is designed for medium to large scale traffic.

What do you guys think? Has anyone compared speed and performance? And is ASP.NET MVC better for large scale apps than ASP.NET WebForms?

In short, between these two choices, which would you choose to use for a large scale enterprise application?

Answer 1

I think MVC is a lighter framework, and more performant because it doesn't do a lot of the things that the WebForms framework does out of the box, like viewstate for example. I don't think it would be fair to say that MVC is not for larger scale applications, as it probably scales better than WebForms would in terms of performance. In terms of out of the box features, WebForms does more for you because it handles state between posts for you, via viewstate, etc.

I don't have any links to performance comparisons with me, but I would be extremely surprised if there aren't any out there. Even microsoft probably has some.

Answer 2

Sounds like your friend is underqualified for his position.

Answer 3

• Development Speed: WebForms
• Performance Speed: MVC
• Ease of Use: WebForms (Typically)
• Unit Testing: MVC (Typically)

Answer 4

this site is a best example of ASP.net MVC's performance ans scaling

some features which I think which is necessary for Enterprise and which MVC provides are

1. Unit testing - even though it takes time to implement this initially it saves lots of time in the future

2. Sepeation of Concerns - this really improves development and modification speed

3. Performance - since both MVC and Webforms use the same ASP.net as the core framework and MVC is lighter and HTTP compliant it give you a better performance