Towards Identifying Performance Bottlenecks

[Jeff]

Okay, I know there is likely no straght-forward way to get a definitive
answer to the question, "why is my page loading so slowly tonight?"; but I'm
thinking that there *are* some things we can measure to get *some* general
idea of where the bottleneck is. I can sit here and theorize about why it's
periodically slow, but I'd like to be able to know what's causing the
periodical performance degradation.

My situation is that I have an ASP.NET Web site hosted out on the Internet.
Usually performance is great - the pages load fast. But sometimes it seems
to take forever (3-5 seconds vs the usual < 1 second). I cache *every*
database hit, so I can be pretty sure that the connection between my Web
Server and SQL Server is *not* the explanation - at least after the initial
page requests.

Is there something I can do on my Web server (Yes, I have full admin access)
to measure response times? What would I be measuring? I know in SQL Server
there is Performance Monitor - what about Web sites?

The case I'm most interested in knowing is this: how would I identify the
case where [my Web server is performing normally/fast], but my local
broadband carrier is having some performance bottleneck issues that explain
most or all of the observed slow-down?

Thanks for your consideration!

-Jeff

 

[Robbe Morris [C# MVP]]

Are you using any type of IIS compression software
like port80software? This can certainly help.

You may also run into bottlenecks
of network traffic at your co-location provider.