performance issues when using 3rd party ASP.Net packages on external-facing sites

Question

I'm an experienced C# winforms person, but new to ASP.Net. I'm developing a site which will be externally facing, but will not have massive numbers of users (wouldn't expect more than maybe 50 at a time). The users of the site would probably be very smart, but not necessarily tech savvy (psychologists).

Because I'm new to web development in general, I was considering using 3rd party tools such as Telerik's ASP.Net with AJAX controls, as these will allow me to build a page that looks reasonably good, which I would have no hope of doing from scratch in a reasonable timeframe. Psychologists tend to be pretty picky about things looking professional and having a good user experience.

I was wondering if using controls like these will make the site less responsive, and therefore not as good user experience? Is it possible to quantify how much slower the telerik version would be? Does anyone have any hints about possible tradeoffs of performance and functionality? Is there some middle ground between doing things from scratch in ASP.Net and using complex controls like those from Telerik?

Answer 1

I use the Telerk controls to build my websites from some time and I am happy with the overall performance when it comes to having many controls on the same page. I found recently that have a page on their site (named 'topperformance') dedicated on performance optimization tips.

as well as quite active and vocal community which shares tricks to boost the loading time of the pages. I come upon a couple of interesting forum threads when browsing their 'general issues' support section several days ago, you may check them out too.

Good luck with your choice and hope that my pointers are helpful.

Dick

Answer 2

If you use RadGrid, or other Telerik RadControls for Asp.net

• your Javascript size will increase dramatically.
• Your CSS size will increase significantly.
• Telerik advises use of RadStyleManager, and RadScriptManager
• I analyzed my site with YSlow - where I noticed multiple Http requests for the multiple JS and CSS that were downloaded (telerik*.wxd resources)
• Using RadStyleManager and RadScriptManager combines multiple HTTP requests into one - so http roundtrips are decreased
• Using RadStyleManager and RadSCriptManager is effective and quick way of handling this (I had to add two lines to my Master Page).
• You might also want to look at http compression on IIS - I would advise against using Telerik's RadCompression as it binds you deeper into their technology.

In a nutshell, I was able to minimize my performance impact with some quick steps.