Linq to Sql and T-SQL Performance Discrepancy - asp.net-mvc

Question

I have an MVC web site the presents a paged list of data records from a SQL Server database. The UI allows the user to filter the returned data on a number of different criteria, e.g. email address. Here is a snippet of code:
Stopwatch stopwatch = new Stopwatch();
var temp = SubscriberDB
.GetSubscribers(model.Filter, model.PagingInfo);
// Inspect SQL expression here
stopwatch.Start();
model.Subscribers = temp.ToList();
stopwatch.Stop(); // 9 seconds plus compared to < 1 second in Query Analyzer
When this code is run, the StopWatch shows an execution time of around 9 seconds. If I capture the generated SQL expression (just before it is evaluated with the .ToList() method) and cut'n'paste that as a query into SQL Server Management Studio, the execution times drops to less than 1 second. For reference here is the generated SQL expression:
SELECT [t2].[SubscriberId], [t2].[Email], [t3].[Reference] AS [DataSet], [t4].[Reference] AS [DataSource], [t2].[Created]
FROM (
SELECT [t1].[SubscriberId], [t1].[SubscriberDataSetId], [t1].[SubscriberDataSourceId], [t1].[Email], [t1].[Created], [t1].[ROW_NUMBER]
FROM (
SELECT ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY [t0].[Email], [t0].[SubscriberDataSetId]) AS [ROW_NUMBER], [t0].[SubscriberId], [t0].[SubscriberDataSetId], [t0].[SubscriberDataSourceId], [t0].[Email], [t0].[Created]
FROM [dbo].[inbox_Subscriber] AS [t0]
WHERE [t0].[Email] LIKE '%_EMAIL_ADDRESS_%'
) AS [t1]
WHERE [t1].[ROW_NUMBER] BETWEEN 0 + 1 AND 0 + 20
) AS [t2]
INNER JOIN [dbo].[inbox_SubscriberDataSet] AS [t3] ON [t3].[SubscriberDataSetId] = [t2].[SubscriberDataSetId]
INNER JOIN [dbo].[inbox_SubscriberDataSource] AS [t4] ON [t4].[SubscriberDataSourceId] = [t2].[SubscriberDataSourceId]
ORDER BY [t2].[ROW_NUMBER]
If I remove the email filter clause, then the controller's StopWatch returns a similar response time to the SQL Management Studio query, less than 1 second - so I am assuming that the basic interface to SQL plumbing is working correctly and that the problem lies with the evaluation of the Linq expression. I should also mention that this is quite a large database with upwards of 1M rows in the subscriber table.
Can anyone throw any light on why there should be such a high (x10) performance differential and what, if anything can be done to address this?

Answer 1

Well not sure about that. 1M rows with a full like can take quiet time. Is Email indexed? Can you run the query with Email% instead of %Email% and see what happen?