How to keep my ASP.NET app always “alive”, and if its a bad idea, why shouldn't I do it?

Question

I've recently deployed an ASP.NET application to my shiny new VPS and while I'm happy with the general performance increase that a VPS can give over a shared hosting solution, I'm unhappy with the startup time of my application.

My web application takes a fair amount of time to start up when my client first hits it. I'm not running it in debug mode (disabled that in my web.config), and it doesn't have any real work to do on startup - I have no code in my application start event handler, I don't start any extra threads, nothing. The first time my client hits my application it takes a good 15-20 seconds to respond. Subsequent calls take 1-2 seconds, unless I wait a few minutes for my application to shut down. Then it's back to a 15-20 second startup time.

(I'm aware that my timing benchmark is very unscientific, those numbers should just give a feel for the performance on startup of my app).

My understanding of ASP.NET was that IIS (7.0, in this case), compiles a web application the first time it is ever run, and then caches those binaries until such a time as the web application is changed. Is my understanding incorrect?

So, after that book-sized preface, here are my questions:

• Is my understanding of ASP.NET's compilation incorrect? How does it actually work?
• Is there a way I can force IIS to cache my binaries, or keep my application alive indefinitely?
• If it's a bad idea to do either of the things in my previous question, why is it a bad idea, and what can I do instead to increase startup performance?

Thanks!

Edit: it appears my question is a slight duplicate of this question (I thought I did a better job of searching for an answer to this on here, haha). I think, however, that my question is more comprehensive, and I'd appreciate if it wasn't closed as a duplicate unless there are better, already-asked questions on here that address this.

Answer 1

IIS also shuts down your web app after a given time period, depending on its configuration. I'm not as familiar with IIS7 and where to configure this, so you might want to do a little research on how to configure this (starting point?).

Is it bad? Depends on how good your code is. If you're not leaking memory or resources, probably not.

The other solution is to precompile your website. This might be the better option for you. You'll have to check it out and see, however, as it may come with a downside, depending on how you interact with your website.

Answer 2

My understanding of ASP.NET was that IIS (7.0, in this case), compiles a web application the first time it is ever run, and then caches those binaries until such a time as the web application is changed. Is my understanding incorrect?

That is correct. Specifically, the assemblies are built as shadow copies (not to be confused with the volume snapshot service / shadow copy feature). This enables you to replace the code in the folder on the fly without affecting existing running sessions. ASP.NET will detect the change, and compile new versions into the target directory (typically Temporary ASP.NET Files). More on that process: Understanding ASP.NET Dynamic Compilation

Answer 3

If its purely the compilation time then often the most efficient approach is to hit the website yourself after the recycle. Make a call at regular intervals to ensure that it is you who receives the 15 second delay not your client.

I would be surprised if that is all compilation time however (depending on hardware) - do you have a lot of static instances of classes? Do they do a lot of work on start-up?

Either with tracing or profiling you could probably quite quickly work out where the start-up time was spent.

As to why keeping a process around is a bad idea, I believe its due to clear-up. No matter how well we look after our data or how well behaved the GC is, there is a good clear-up performed by restarting the process. Things like fragmentation can go away and any other resource issues that build up over time are cleared down. Therefore it is quite a bad idea to keep a server process running indefinitely.