In ASP.Net, what is the best way to understand and analyze performance?

Question

Until now, I have not create any massive applications using ASP.Net. However, I am looking to create an application that has the potential to be very performance intensive. So I am looking for some tools or best practices when it comes to performance. I would like to be able to know how to:

1. See my current performance (good or bad)
2. View items that need fixing
3. And being able to compare two performance variable items would be great as well.

For any of you expert .Net Devs out there, I would really appreciate some help. I am not looking for anyone to solve my problems - but I am looking for people to help me get pointed in the right direction. Links to the best articles on this stuff or personal advice would be great.

Thanks in advance, Gabriel

Answer 1

When you are talking about performance, do you mean client side (JavaScript) performance or web server performance (load testing)?

If you're talking about JavaScript performance, test on really slow machines, using various browsers and various operating systems. I'm not sure if there are any tools available that will test this for you, given the differences in platforms, javascript engines, and the effect of an old machine.

If you mean server performance, then you want to get a couple of things:

• A load testing tool
• ANTS Performance Profiler

ANTS will show you portions of your code that are the bottlenecks, and show you timelines for the entire page load process (database wait times as well).

Answer 2

This is a big subject and there many areas to cover, client side, browser performance, server side, scalability.

One place I'd suggest starting with is end-user perception, really what is good or bad will be decided by your users. For example, if your site takes a few seconds to process something, just displaying instant feedback (such as an animated GIF) instead of a full page post back can make the world of difference to the user exeperience.

I would wholeheartedly recommend the APress book "Ultra-fast ASP.NET" it is filled with many little gems to guide you through all of the issues you mention (worth the buy even if you're not using SQL server).