I've been having performance issues with a high traffic ASP.NET 2.0 site running on Windows 2000. While editing the web.config file I noticed that the authentication mode was set to 'Windows'. I changed it to 'None'. The only users this site has are anonymous and it gets 25,000+ page views at day. Could this have been a caused performance issues?
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177answers:
2
A:
There is a small potential, but if you are not securing any folders, it shouldn't be an issue.
In reality it would mostly be an issue if you needed to secure a folder path.
There might be a SMALL performance hit but I can't imagine it would be that bad.
Mitchel Sellers
2008-11-05 00:36:30
A:
It's very unlikely. Windows authentication is performed within IIS, and then a token is sent on to ASP.NET, so if you're using Anonymous Authentication, then it'll be effectively instantaneous, as this token will be created when the security context is created and that'll be it.
The 'None' authentication is intended for custom authentication, rather than for anonymous authentication- anonymous is one of the Windows authentication choices (i.e. IIS auth).
Perhaps you should setup tracing on the app and get methods to log event periods, to see where it's slow. It's likely to be a slow-running query, a timeout issue, lack of disk-space/swap-space, something like that.
Check out: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa291347(VS.71).aspx for more detail on the authentication methods.