ASP.Net / Umbraco Website has (initially) very high server response time.

Question

Hi guys,

I've got this problem. I launched an ASP.NET website with the Umbraco CMS on an ISP. (Its just a very basic informative site. nothing special.)

When I go want to visit the website however, the first pageload takes a lot of time, sometimes even up to 20 seconds. Of course this is ridiculous. Afterwards, I am able to navigate the site relatively quick..

So every first pageload is slow, then everything is OK, more or less.

Does anybody have any idea what the problem could be? Would it be IIS? ASP.NET?

Answer 1

If it is the first request to be served, IIS at least starts the APP Pool. This might take a bit of a time. Maybe Umbraco loads initially some data, but I did not have any experience with Umbraco, so that's beyond my knowledge.

-sa

Answer 2

What do you meen by first page load?

Have you just done a build? If this is a website then .Net will compile and load the dll. Then IIS will cache page outputs.

Do you have any large images on the page?

Essentially there are an infinate number of reasons. Have you used firebug? Determine where the loadtime is?

Do you have a link?

Answer 3

You may want to look into a keep alive service. There are many available that regularly poll you site to keep the application pool running and prevent the startup delay you are seeing. More information here and here.

Answer 4

IIS is probably configured to shutdown the application pool after N minutes of inactivity.

AFAIK, this is the default behaviour on IIS.