ASP.NET - 6 Tips for Writing High-Performance Web Applications

Microsoft frequently adds new features and functionality to ASP.NET to make it easier for developers to optimize the performance of their web applications. Each web application, nowadays, has to be compatible with a variety of operating systems, web browsers and devices. At the same time, the ASP.NET applications must be effective in handling loads of user requests per seconds. So it has becomes essential for each programmer to identify and remove the performance bottlenecks to make the application powerful and popular.

6 Tips to Write Writing High-Performance ASP.NET Applications

• Use the Cache Class: An ASP.NET developer can use the Cache class to use a variety of comprehensive caching mechanism. The commonly used objects in ASP.NET development further enable him to store the resources, along with defining validity, priority and expiration for each cached object. At the same time, he also has option to attach callbacks to the cached objects that will be invoked each time an object is removed from the cache. In addition to using the Insert method of Cache class, the programmer can also add objects to the cache by adding these to the cache dictionary.

• Connection Pooling: Often the connection between a web application and database consumes a huge amount of resources. So a developer has to reuse connections to the database through connection pooling. When the connection pooling is used, a new connection is set up only if there is not free connection available in the pool. As no new connection will be set up for each new request, there will not be any impact on the TCP connections. However, the developer must track and close the connections immediately after their processing to prevent leaking connections.
  

• Making Your Web Page Asynchronous: In ASP.NET, requests are handled in a synchronous way. Each time the web server passes a request to the web application, the request is queued to the thread pool. Also, a worker thread is assigned for processing each request. As the worker thread is limited, the new requests are handles only after the current requests are processed. So developers have to reduce the request time in case the request is required to call a web service or retrieve information from a database. A programmer can make the input/output operations smooth by making your web page as an Asynchronous Page. After marking a page as asynchronous, he has to create a new PageAsyncTask object, and pass it to parameters for begin, end and timeout methods.
  

• Use Data Paging Support: Most ASP.NET developers use DataGrid to easily retrieve and display data to the users. The DataGrid also comes with data paging support, which enables you to show a specific number of records at a time. The users are allowed to navigate forwards and backwards through the records by clicking on the paging UI displayed at the bottom of the DataGrid. However, the paging feature requires developers to bind all data to the particular grid. The feature will filter the data retrieved from your database, and discard the data that need not be displayed to the users. So performance of the web application will not be impacted when more data is retrieved from the database based on the user request.
  

• Enable View State: ASP.NET allows developers to store specific state data inside the generated web pages through the view state attribute. You can use the view state as an alternative to cookies and server memory. Most ASP.NET controls also support view state to continue with the settings made during the interaction with other page elements. However, the view state will increase the loading time of the page during the request and serving stage. So you must disable view state at the page or control level when you are not using the attribute. The turning off will contribute towards boosting the performance of your web application.
  

• Turn Tracing and Debugging Off: Most ASP.NET programmers ignore the significance of disabling the tracing and debugging options in the web.config file. You can turn these options on during the application stage. But the values of both tracing and debugging must be set as false before deploying the application. If the developer forgets to turn off the debugging and tracing options, it will have a negative impact on the performance of web application. For instance, requests will not time our when the debug is turn on. Similarly, just-in-time (JIT) will not be applied to the code when the debug is set as true. So these options must be set as false before deploying the ASP.NET application.
  

Microsoft has further recommends a set of best practices to improve user experience by optimized the performance of your web application. Most of these best practices are also aimed to reduce the amount of time and efforts required to build powerful web applications.

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