Asp.net E-commerce performance

Question

I am developing e-commerce project on Asp.Net 3.5 with C#. I am using 3 tiers (Data + Business + UI) structure to reach the data from database (Msql 2005).

There are stored procedures and everything going on from them.(CRUD methods)

There is a performance issue here, project is running so slowly. I couldn't find any problem in transaction model.

Also the project is running on shared hosting at overseas country.Database server and web server are running on different machines.Database server has nearly 1000 databases.

How can I test and learn where is the problem ?

Answer 1

Since you're running on a shared hosting service, I would guess that's where your problem is. You're competing for server resources with every other website and database on those servers.

To make sure, I would set up a local environment that mimics your production environment. Then perform some standard stress tests to see how it performs. If it performs how you would expect, then it is probably your hosting solution.

With shared hosting solutions, you really do get what you pay for. If it's a system that requires a lot more speed then you're getting, you should look at a dedicated hosting solution.

Answer 2

Since there is upwards of 1000 Databases sharing resources I would take a stab that might be your issue.... If you connect to your database and it takes 5 seconds to run a simple query then you can guess the problem.

I would add some stopwatch functionality onto a "testpage" that runs on your web server. This should give you the basic info to see if there is a "bottle neck" in waiting for the database to return your query. If you have made it that far then I would suspect it would be your web server.

Your last option would be be to set up a simple low spec machine with DB and web server on it and just test. Depending on how much traffic your site is getting you should be able to get a pretty good idea of its response time.

Tools such as YSlow might also be of some help however these are usually used more for fine tuning.

Answer 3

I suggest you take a look at Tracing:

http://davidhayden.com/blog/dave/archive/2005/07/17/2396.aspx

This enables you to see a stack trace (The last picture in the article), and localize your performance bottlenecks.

Answer 4

A quick solution I developed to keep logs of performance on my web app may help you here. I have a web server and DB server running a similar-sounding app. I wrote a web service that runs a "benchmarking" stored procedure and returns the run time. I wrote a win app that runs on my development server that calls the web service, passes it the name of the stored procedure to run, and times how long the whole request takes. The win app writes the data to a log file and runs every 10 minutes as a scheduled task. Extra bells and whistles include automatic emails to team members when performance exceeds the specified threshold 3 consecutive times, fails to connect, and when it recovers to normal performance after a slow period.

This provides a general indication of how a user's experience on the website will be at any given time and serves as a warning bell for the team. Not exactly the best solution, but I wrote it in a couple of hours several months ago and have used the data it creates for troubleshooting purposes many times.