Good Link on HTTP Performance

A very good link on HTTP performance

http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2008/03/20/roundup-on-parallel-connections/

Good HTTP Sniffer Tool

In recent past I have been looking on the performance of our web application. To understand what takes more time I was looking for a tool that provide me detailed report what part of the web page takes more time.

My hunt started with Fiddler, an excellent tool and provides great information but when I looked at the tool named HTTPWatch, I was IMPRESSED. An awesome tool and provide great detail information similar to Fiddler. But the most impressive was it get integrated with your IE browser including IE 8.0 beta. So while you traverse a page and wait for the page getting rendered the tool will display all the HTTP request from browser to web page server. This includes the AJAX request.

Great tool!!!!! try it out Download

ASP.NET Config files: Un-necessary Strings

We have been using ANTS Profiler lately to understand the memory behaviour of our ASP.NET application. What we observed is

1. Too much memory have been allocated by Strings Objects.
2. These string objects survives across many GC collection.

When we drill those strings more, we discovered

1. That these are not our strings.
2. Actually ASP.NET loads the settings of machine.config and web.config into the memory.
3. I can now make out why it need to unload the AppDomain when we change these config files as the environment have to reload the settings again.
4. There are many settings in these config files which have no relevance to our application.
5. So we started commenting or removing from the machine.config file. (We took the backup of the ORIGINAL file).
6. For e.g. webPart settings. We removed the entire block.
7. We tested our web application and found everything to work fine.
8. We then started removing those un-necessary entries.
9. We then used the ANTS profiler to profile the memory and found that we save some 58 MB of memory by doing so.
10. There was direct impact on the Gen 0 collection.

We haven’t decided whether we will do these on our production server but these can be done provided our application is the only app being used on that server.

Please take appropriate backup before trying this out.