3 Steps to improve application performance in ASP.Net

Posted by Nishtha Singh on January 12th, 2018

Improving the performance of .Net application is one of the most misunderstood concepts among several techgeeks and techlearners across the globe. In fact, I believe that it is a great piece of technology. It’s just that its performance needs to be improved so that one is able to build applications that would consume the least amount of memory and require the least amount of processing to produce the desired output.

And to achieve this, it becomes very important for you to adhere to the recommended guidelines and techniques that are instrumental for improving, optimizing and boosting the performance of your web application. The following post emphasizes on some of the most important things that need to be considered in order to improve the application performance and responsiveness of the web apps that are built using ASP.Net

Reduce page load time

In order to decrease the page load time of your web pages, it is very important to minify the scripts and CSS files. Moreover, don’t forget to avoid excessively looking large images, redundant tags, and nested tables. Being an experienced asp.net developer, I would highly recommend to avoid using server controls until and unless there is a specific reason to use them.

Many professionals have this habit of visiting web server, again and again, to facilitate faster page loads, make sure to keep such unnecessary roundtrips to the Web server at distance. You can take advantage of the Page.IsPostback property to avoid unnecessary server processing on a roundtrip. This will reduce the adequate amount of traffic. Apart from this, you can even consider following the technique of pre-compilation. Here you pre-compile the web pages in your application to reduce the working set size.

State management

Avoid using ViewState to facilitate faster page loads. Always keep this in mind that each and every byte added to a webpage by enabling its ViewState would incur two bytes of network traffic—one byte in each direction. For example, from the server to the client and the other from the client to the server. Also, it is very important to remove the runat="server" form tag from your Web page if you don't need to use ViewState.       

Caching is another state management technique that can be used to judiciously store relatively stale data in memory. Caching the entire Web pages or a portion of your Web pages will be more than enough. Just make sure to optimize the code to ensure that you use resources (memory and processor, etc.)

Resource management

Following resource management techniques in a proper manner can boost your application’s performance to a great extent. All you need to acquire is the resources ranging from files handles to database connections, etc. You should write your code in such a way that the objects are not promoted to higher generations. After all, the garbage collector works more on the frequent basis in the lower generations than in the higher ones.

Lastly, you can even take advantage of stored procedures in order to reduce the processing overhead in your database server for frequently used queries.