tracking down slow performance of an ASP.NET web page

Question

Hi, I want to find out the reason for slow performance of some web pages of an ASP.NET intranet website. the reasons could be many like large view state, number of round trips to the server and database, inefficient code in UI/middle tier etc. most of these slow pages are complex web pages with some third party controls, user controls.

what is the quickest way to find out what is causing the page to slow down without debugging each and every interaction on the web page and stepping through lines of code. will the code profilers like ANTS be of any help? or are there any better ways? there could be many factors for slow performance of a page, but I want to fix them in priority order.

thanks, Rama

Answer 1

You can use a firefox addon named yslow whcih analyzes web pages based on Yahoo's performance rules.

If you want to check code performance then you can use a profiling tool.

For SQL there is SQL Server Profiler.

For .Net you can use ANTS Performance Profiler

Answer 2

Use Fiddler or HTTPWatch to profile the web application, this works with IE too..

And

I just came across a interesting post by john resig - deep tracing IE about the new client side profiler tool for IE. It is awsome & Its free.

You can get it here

Cheers

Ramesh Vel

Answer 3

Try FastSQLDataSource. It helps when you need faster display of large amounts of data in your web application using grids, lists and other bound controls. http://www.nitrosbase.net It can work almost without coding or sometimes with no coding at all.

Answer 4

Some addtions:

• Search for unproper Exception handling / throwing etc.
• Search for left debugging code - one System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteIf in a large loop or dataset is devastating
• search for multiple databinding - broken page life cycle
• search for code smell - the shit smells before hitting the fan ...