Web App Performance Problem - asp.net-mvc

I have a website that is hanging every 5 or 10 requests. When it works, it works fast, but if you leave the browser sit for a couple minutes and then click a link, it just hangs without responding. The user has to push refresh a few times in the browser and then it runs fast again.
I'm running .NET 3.5, ASP.NET MVC 1.0 on IIS 7.0 (Windows Server 2008). The web app connects to a SQLServer 2005 DB that is running locally on the same instance. The DB has about 300 Megs of RAM and the rest is free for web requests I presume.
It's hosted on GoGrid's cloud servers, and this instance has 1GB of RAM and 1 Core. I realize that's not much, but currently I'm the only one using the site, and I still receive these hangs.
I know it's a difficult thing to troubleshoot, but I was hoping that someone could point me in the right direction as to possible IIS configuration problems, or what the "rough" average hardware requirements would be using these technologies per 1000 users, etc. Maybe for a webserver the minimum I should have is 2 cores so that if it's busy you still get a response. Or maybe the slashdot people are right and I'm an idiot for using Windows period, lol. In my experience though, it's usually MY algorithm/configuration error and not the underlying technology's fault.
Any insights are appreciated.

What diagnistics are available to you? Can you tell what happens when the user first hits the button? Does your application see that request, and then take ages to process it, or is there a delay and then your app gets going and works as quickly as ever? Or does that first request just get lost completely?
My guess is that there's some kind of paging going on, I beleive that Windows tends to have a habit of putting non-recently used apps out of the way and then paging them back in. Is that happening to your app, or the DB, or both?
As an experiment - what happens if you have a sneekly little "howAreYou" page in your app. Does the tiniest possible amount of work, such as getting a use count from the db and displaying it. Have a little monitor client hit that page every minute or so. Measure Performance over time. Spikes? Consistency? Does the very presence of activity maintain your applicaition's presence and prevent paging?
Another idea: do you rely on any caching? Do you have any kind of aging on that cache?

Your application pool may be shutting down because of inactivity. There is an Idle Time-out setting per pool, in minutes (it's under the pool's Advanced Settings - Process Model). It will take some time for the application to start again once it shuts down.
Of course, it might just be the virtualization like others suggested, but this is worth a shot.

Is the site getting significant traffic? If so I'd look for poorly-optimized queries or queries that are being looped.
Your configuration sounds fine assuming your overall traffic is relatively low.

To many data base connections without being release?
Connecting some service/component that is causing timeout?
Bad resource release?
Network traffic?
Looping queries or in code logic?

Related

New Relic's pings not improving cold start

There's a similar question about app harbor on StackOverflow, but the user didn't try to use new relic to overcome the problem.
I deployed my ASP.NET MVC project on App Harbor. It's very easy to configure and you can even set automatic deployments from Git. However, as my website is still mainly used only by me, I was getting very long cold starts (over 15 secs). To avoid it, I installed New Relic. The idea was to simultaneously to monitor the application but also to create periodic pings that, according to "a lot of people", would drastically reduce the loading time.
It's not working. I have New Relic correctly pinging my application every minute, but I still get very long cold starts. For instance, 5 min ago, I've got a cold start of 16 seconds. 1 minute after, I got the page loaded in less than a second.
I know I could have used Pingdom or StillAlive to achieve the same result:
How do I improve app performance on AppHarbor?
I wouldn't like to do it because I like New Relic and I don't want to have a lot of add-on's on app harbor as they will slow down my website. Do you have any idea what might be causing it?
I'm not familiar with AppHarbor's setup. But if it's using IIS, the pinging is just keeping the application pool from reaching the idle timeout. But there the default IIS setting for the application pool to be recycled every 29 hours no matter the number of requests. And it's normally in the best interest to let it recycle once in a while, so working around it may not be in your best interest.
Your best bet is to reduce the number of things happening on application start. Precompiling your views is a good place to start. And heck, Stack Exchange/Stack Overflow precompiles views to avoid the application start up cost.

Azure Websites and ASP.NET, how much inactivity before the app pool is recycled causing a recompilation?

I have a MVC3, .NET4.5 asp.net web application hosted on Azure Websites.
I am experimenting with "Free", "Shared" and "Standard" scaling configurations.
I have noticed that after a period of inactivity the compiled code get dropped from memory, or the app pool gets recycled forcing a JIT recompile.
My main question is what is time period before the compiled code gets dropped forcing a recompile? I assume this is as a result of the application pool recycling? I have come across this on standard shared hosts such as DiscountASP.
My second question is: What is the best approach to minimise this issue as I would not like my users bumping into this recompilation lag? My initial thoughts are precompilation.
Many thanks in advance.
EDIT:
I have a found a related SO post on this here: App pool timeout for azure web sites
However it seems, as like standard Shared hosting, one cannot change App Pool recycling. One has more flexibility with the "Standard" scale option, since it is dedicated. So the likely options at present are:
1) Precompilation
2) Use of "Keep alive" ping sites.
EDIT2:
1) "Keep Alive" approach seems to be working. I have a 10 minute monitor running.
I believe the inactivity period is 20 minutes by default. I haven't used web sites yet so I'm not famailiar with rescrtictions on changing settings but one quick way to keep your site activie is to use a uptime monitoring service like Pingdom (you can check one site for free at time of writing), this will ping your site regularly and prevent it from becoming idle.

Server runs out of RAM - How to make more efficient?

My website seems to go down for up to an hour almost every day. I don't know much about servers so would appreciate advice on what to do next.
The website (3dsbuzz.com) has a Wordpress section, Wiki, Gallery and a VBulletin forum each with their own custom code and plug-ins. So there are lots of potential places which could be inefficiently coded. It runs from a cloud server with 2GB of RAM. The MySQL database is 370MB. We get around 30,000 page views per day.
What would be the best way to reduce the amount of down time? Should I upgrade my server (I can't really afford to) or is 2GB reasonable? I have plenty of errors in my error log, but they don't always occur around the same times as the server going down, so I'm not sure how relevant it is.
A solution is to remove each conponent one by one until the server no longer crashes.
Then, you know where to look for and can investigate further.

ASP.Net MVC Website.. extremely slow after publishing

Hi
I've been working on a medium sized MVC project. It works fine on the localhost at a good speed rate. In each page, there's a lot of server-side data retrieved, I use a lot of jquery to minimize the traffic to the server, but even then, the webpage loads very slowly. There are many events on which I retrieve json results, to get a specific number from the database and make calculations, this data takes a long time to be retrieved on the webpage, although on the localhost it is immediately shown. Also, when I submit pages, it takes awfully a lot of time to submit. I've published my project to GoDaddy's server and also my database is there. What could be the problem that is making the project that slow? How can I minimize it? And why is it only when the website is online and not on the localhost too?
As such, issue can be anywhere and only certain way to know is instrumenting the code. I will suggest that you add simple logging traces with date-time stamp in your server code (note that logging should be configurable, any logging framework (including System.Diagnostic.Trace) should support it) and check where the time is spent. For example, database trips can be expensive etc. If you don't find the culprit on server side code i.e. sever is serving the request in reasonable time then you have to look at the performance over network. Tools such as Fiddler (or Firefox) should help you here - sometimes issuing too many requests from browser is also problematic because browser may make only n concurrent requests or even server may have been configured to accept only n requests from particular client - this could result in serialization of request increasing total response time. These scenarios are difficult to catch on localhost because network latency is almost zero there. You may also use tool such as YSlow for related performance improvement suggestions. But please do your investigation first, find the bottlenecks and then ask for solutions to specific problems.
Run it in chrome. Turn on the developer tools. Expand the Console. watch for errors. Also from there you can monitor those network calls to see which is slow.
if MVC uses entity framework (based on LINQ), it will sure be slow
because LINQ is slow compared to the old ADO.NET

How to increase the performance on my ASP.NET MVC 2 website?

I run a social community site for card players. I currently have 7,000+ members and getting 2,000 visitors/15k+ pageviews a day. Recently the site has started to really slow down during peak hours of the day and I am starting to think my site needs some serious performance optimizations in the code and settings. I really don't want to purchase a second server to run the site as I am pretty sure my current server should be able to handle this kind of load easily.
During peak hours, when the pages load, they still load very quickly. The problem is that a lot of times it will timeout and give a "website not available" error in the browser. Then you refresh it and it loads up quickly. Then a couple of pageviews later it will do it again. My CPU and RAM usage do not even get very high during these times, so I must believe it is in my IIS settings or something. I have done some searching and cannot find any good answers or ideas of what a fix could be.
Here are some stats of my setup:
ASP.NET MVC 2 w/ Output Caching and Partial View caching
IIS 7
Windows Web Server 2008 RC2 64-Bit
AMD Athlon II X2
4GB of RAM
My heavier pages on the site have quite a bit of database reads and a lot of image requests. I am not sure if this is the problem, because when a page does load it is VERY fast.
I did purchase a new server I am building and was thinking about switching everything to this instead. The new server I just got is gonna run an Intel Xeon X3430 2.4GHz Quad-Core w/ HT and 8GB RAM.
I am looking for a few possible things I could look into for this problem and if there are any possible solutions or settings I could implement to stop the "website not available" messages and also help my server handle future traffic increases as the site grows. Would upgrading the server to this new one make the difference?
It looks like this is more of an IIS issue than your code or hardware. There is a default setting for max concurrent connections per cpu and queue length that you may be reaching.
See Optimising IIS Performance and someone with a similar problem (and resolution).

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