[asp.net] Fixing slow initial load for IIS

Web Hosting Challenge

You have to remember that none of the machine configuration options are available if you are hosted on a shared server as many of us (smaller companies and individuals) are.

ASP.NET MVC Overhead

My site takes at least 30 seconds when it hasn't been hit in over 20 minutes (and the web app has been stopped). It is terrible.

Another Way to Test Performance

There's another way to test if it is your ASP.NET MVC start up or something else. Drop a normal HTML page on your site where you can hit it directly.
If the problem is related to ASP.NET MVC start up then the HTML page will render almost immediately even when the web app hasn't been started.
That's how I first recognized that the problem was in the ASP.NET MVC startup. I loaded an HTML page at any time and it would load blazing fast. Then, after hitting that HTML page I'd hit one of my ASP.NET MVC URLs and I'd get the Chrome message "Waiting for raddev.us..."

Another Test With Helpful Script

After that I wrote a LINQPad (check out http://linqpad.net for more) script that would hit my web site every 8 minutes (less than the time for the app to unload -- which should be 20 minutes) and I let it run for hours.

While the script was running I hit my web site and every time my site came up blazingly fast. This gives me a good idea that most likely the slowness I was experiencing was because of ASP.NET MVC startup times.

Get LinqPad and you can run the following script -- just change the URL to your own and let it run and you can test this easily. Good luck.

NOTE: In LinqPad you'll need to press F4 and add a reference to System.Net to add the library which will retrieve your page.

ALSO : make sure you change the String URL variable to point at a URL that will load a route from your ASP.NET MVC site so the engine will run.

System.Timers.Timer webKeepAlive = new System.Timers.Timer();
Int64 counter = 0;
void Main()
{
    webKeepAlive.Interval = 5000;
    webKeepAlive.Elapsed += WebKeepAlive_Elapsed;
    webKeepAlive.Start();
}

private void WebKeepAlive_Elapsed(object sender, System.Timers.ElapsedEventArgs e)
{
    webKeepAlive.Stop();
    try
    {
        // ONLY the first time it retrieves the content it will print the string
        String finalHtml = GetWebContent();
        if (counter < 1)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(finalHtml);
        }
        counter++;
    }
    finally
    {
        webKeepAlive.Interval = 480000; // every 8 minutes
        webKeepAlive.Start();
    }
}

public String GetWebContent()
{
    try
    {
    String URL = "http://YOURURL.COM";
    WebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(URL);
    WebResponse response = request.GetResponse();
    Stream data = response.GetResponseStream();
    string html = String.Empty;
    using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(data))
    {
        html = sr.ReadToEnd();
    }
    Console.WriteLine (String.Format("{0} : success",DateTime.Now));
    return html;
    }
    catch (Exception ex)
    {
        Console.WriteLine (String.Format("{0} -- GetWebContent() : {1}",DateTime.Now,ex.Message));
        return "fail";
    }
}