FranchiseBlast, our franchise management platform, is a ‘large’ solution inside Visual Studio which currently contains 35 projects. In total, we manage over 60 interrelated projects, and have always been concerned at improving the compilation/load performance on our development machines. This post is a quick summary of what we did to keep things as fast as possible.
Personally, when it starts taking over a minute to compile or load my application, I start throwing things. This was the case early this week and with a bit of work, I managed to cut down things by an order of magnitude (from around 140 seconds down to around 14 seconds) with only software changes. This is what prompted me to write this post.
There are three things worth improving:
I only want to talk about the first two; the only tip I’ll give you for #3 is to get your hands on a profiler such as dotTrace as it is a real time saver.
Get better hardware (Big impact)
You’ll get the best bang for your buck by upgrading your hard disk, especially if you’re using a single 5400 RPM or 7200 RPM drive (download benchmark software to evaluate your current disk). Our projects are stored on a solid state disk. We currently use Intel X25-M G2, but the RevoDrive x2 looks much faster (basically a RAID-0 array of SSDs) if you have an available PCI-Express x4 slot. If you’re cheap and find the SSDs to be too small, just get two large 7200 RPM drives and put them in RAID-0. Make sure you’ve got a robust backup solution.
We have 12GB RAM on our development machines and a recent Core i7 processor, but nothing fancy. This is more than sufficient.
Store your temporary IIS files on your fastest disk or a RAM disk
Depending on the amount of RAM you have, it may make sense to use a RAM disk. I use my RAM disk for my temporary internet files and for IIS’s temporary folder (compilation results). I haven’t measured specific performance details but since I have so much free RAM, might as well try use it in creative ways.
To speed up the first load time, you can tell IIS to store its temporary files on your RAM disk (or fastest disk) by changing the following setting in your web.config files:
<compilation ... tempDirectory="q:\temp\iistemp\"> ... </compilation>
You can either change your project files directly, or, if you’ve lazy and have numerous applications running on your development machine (like I do), update the system-wide web.config files. Note that you need to update this for each runtime version of the Framework and, if running a 64-bit machine, for both Framework and Framework64. On my machine, I needed to modify the following files:
1: C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\CONFIG\Web.config
2: C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\Config\Web.config
3: C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\CONFIG\Web.config
4: C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\Config\Web.config
Trade-off: If you save your RAM disk when shutting down, you’ll notice how much longer it takes to reboot. I can live with that, rebooting only once every couple months.
Review a few magical settings (Most impact)
When an ASP.NET website is loaded for the first time, it pre-compiles all your pages and user controls.
Read more: lavablast
Personally, when it starts taking over a minute to compile or load my application, I start throwing things. This was the case early this week and with a bit of work, I managed to cut down things by an order of magnitude (from around 140 seconds down to around 14 seconds) with only software changes. This is what prompted me to write this post.
There are three things worth improving:
- Compilation time
- First load time (ASP.NET)
- Application speed / database performance
I only want to talk about the first two; the only tip I’ll give you for #3 is to get your hands on a profiler such as dotTrace as it is a real time saver.
Get better hardware (Big impact)
You’ll get the best bang for your buck by upgrading your hard disk, especially if you’re using a single 5400 RPM or 7200 RPM drive (download benchmark software to evaluate your current disk). Our projects are stored on a solid state disk. We currently use Intel X25-M G2, but the RevoDrive x2 looks much faster (basically a RAID-0 array of SSDs) if you have an available PCI-Express x4 slot. If you’re cheap and find the SSDs to be too small, just get two large 7200 RPM drives and put them in RAID-0. Make sure you’ve got a robust backup solution.
We have 12GB RAM on our development machines and a recent Core i7 processor, but nothing fancy. This is more than sufficient.
Store your temporary IIS files on your fastest disk or a RAM disk
Depending on the amount of RAM you have, it may make sense to use a RAM disk. I use my RAM disk for my temporary internet files and for IIS’s temporary folder (compilation results). I haven’t measured specific performance details but since I have so much free RAM, might as well try use it in creative ways.
To speed up the first load time, you can tell IIS to store its temporary files on your RAM disk (or fastest disk) by changing the following setting in your web.config files:
<compilation ... tempDirectory="q:\temp\iistemp\"> ... </compilation>
You can either change your project files directly, or, if you’ve lazy and have numerous applications running on your development machine (like I do), update the system-wide web.config files. Note that you need to update this for each runtime version of the Framework and, if running a 64-bit machine, for both Framework and Framework64. On my machine, I needed to modify the following files:
1: C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\CONFIG\Web.config
2: C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\Config\Web.config
3: C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\CONFIG\Web.config
4: C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\Config\Web.config
Trade-off: If you save your RAM disk when shutting down, you’ll notice how much longer it takes to reboot. I can live with that, rebooting only once every couple months.
Review a few magical settings (Most impact)
When an ASP.NET website is loaded for the first time, it pre-compiles all your pages and user controls.
Read more: lavablast