Why is intranet so slow on our machines?

Question

Hi, we are using IIS 5 + Windows XP on our machines, they have Celeron CPUs @ 2.6 ghz, 2 GB RAM

These machines have control system for machinery, control system logs events to database and we want to show reports for machinery usage, operator logins, etc. We use Windows XP and IIS 5, our applications are ASP.NET (3.5). We use Sql server 2005 express and Crystal Reports 10.5 for reporting.

The problem is, that whenever you open an intranet page after reboot or after longer period of webserver's inactivity, it takes a LOT of time for a page to react, 10-30 seconds. When I open up a page that shows a report, it lags for this amount of time too.

When pages are viewed after the first long load, they render quickly.

The pages are precompiled (helped a bit, but not much), disk is not fragmented, sql server reacts fast (tested with other applications) - I really don't know what's the cause, but I'd like to eliminate it, because this looks very bad with the customer - to wait for half a minute for a report page to display.

Why is this so slow? I have done some sample pages on php/mysql/iis and it was lightning fast... Is there something I can do to 'preload' all of the intranet applications on machine reboot? If nothing helps, I'll make a simple script that will periodically request all pages from the webserver, so it will be 'warmed up', but this is a dumb solution, I think. :(

Answer 1

I guess probably the application pool for the web site is not loaded until the first request - this time is for the out-of-process host process to start running and serve up requests.

Answer 2

IIS takes a few seconds to compile each ASPX page after a recycle. You need to create a warmup script that programatically loads a few of your pages after the recycle. The script will incur the delay so your users don't have to.

Here is an example. http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2006/08/13/697044.aspx It's for SharePoint, but the concept is the same and you should be able to adapt it.