*very* slow initial page load

[Ian Murphy]

Hopefully someone else has seen something similar.

We are experiencing an odd problem with aspnet, iis6 and w2k3. I have
written a small site which works fine during the day. Each morning however
the initial page load can take anything from 10 minutes to over an hour.

Nothing seems to occur during this time. The first page load is simply
incredibly slow. It seems to 'hang' until someone else tried to load the
default.aspx, though there is a period of time during which new sessions do
not get a response either. I know, this doesn't make sense.

I set up a page crawler using Curl which hasn't managed to afect its
behaviour. I tried running a task to load the default.aspx at 4am and a
second task a few minutes later. This hasn't had the slightest effect. Both
tasks simply sat there waiting for a response until 7:02am. At 6:49 a user
opened default.aspx and at 7:02 all three (2x Curl sessions and the user
session) recieved a response.

Can anyone suggest anything, the users are getting nasty....


Ian Murphy

 

[Ollie Riches]

what are you doing in the page load?

Ollie

 

[Ian Murphy]

The problem is that the page is not actually opening, not that the
execution is slow. There is no response at all.

I have a simple two frame page, no code, the two frames point to two
separate .aspx pages, neither of which respond either.

Is there any way of debugging what is going on?

Ian

 

[Ian Murphy]

I should also add that this is a fairly fast machine running sharepoint.
The sharepoint system runs in its own application pool, obviously. I have
set up a separate pool for my application with:

Recycle process every 900 minutes
Max memory usage 200mb
Close process after 20 minutes of inactivity
limit queue to 4000 petitions (no effect, this is an intranet app)
Max 1 worker process

Ian

 

[Ian Murphy]

Also, I crawl the default.aspx at 4am and again at 4:30 am, neither of
which gets a response. What seems to unblock the deadlock is when a user
opens IE and opens the page. They then see a, let say, 15 minute delay
until something appears, after which the pages load instantly. My two
crawlers get a response in the exact same instance as the user(we've had
people noting the times)

This is a dynamic site, so caching cannot be the explanation.

Something is happening overnight which is different from a simple iis
reset. I have tried shutting down iis and restarting it, also clearing the
cache from \windows\microsoft.net\framework\Temp....\ and cannot reproduce
the problem.

This *only* occurs first thing in the morning.

perplexed.

Ian

 

[Ollie Riches]

so what is going on in the page loads of the 2 pages?

Do you really need to use frames?

 

[Ian Murphy]

In one frame it displays a toolbar and in the other it displays a welcome
screen. The toolbar is a control, which does no db access. The welcome
screen reads an access db once.

Even if the other two pages don't work, the frame should appear with a bar,
not even this is happening.

Literally, nothing is being returned. IIS is responding (or else the
browser would timeout) but after that nothing seems to be getting sent back
from the worker process.

Ian

 

[JohnFol]

Hi Ian, I've read the other responses, and it sounds like you need to
determine if it's IIS / Server / SharePoint or the individual pages

Have you heard about Traces?
"ASP.NET includes a Trace object (similar to the Response, Request, and
Context objects) that allows you to write debug statements that appear when
you enable tracing for a page or for the entire application."

I used this quite sucessfully when trying to establish why an ASPX was slow.
You could simply add a trace message giving the event and date / time,
something like :

Trace.Write("Form 1 - Load Event" & now.tostring )
Trace.Write("Form 1 - Starting Toolbar code" & now.tostring )
Trace.Write("Form 1 - Toolbar complete" & now.tostring )
:

(untested).

This will at least identify if the form execution is quick, or if the
problem lies with IIS / network / Sharepoint performing some db admin . . .

 

[Ian Murphy]

Hmm, this could well be worth trying out. I have written my own logging
handler which writes out text messages to a logfile when various things
happen. The initial page load is not currently logged but using the trace
class is probably a better route.

From what I've seen so far I get the impression that I'm not going to see
any trace, as I don't think the app is actually starting.

Ian

 

[Ian Murphy]

Something else, which I had not noticed up until now was in my event log at
7:01 (just before the user recieved a response) I recieved:

Fecha: 20/01/2005
Hora: 7:01:57
Un proceso para el grupo de aplicaciones 'GCPool' falló al responder a un
comando ping. El Id. de proceso es '4500'.

Which translates as 'A process for the application group 'GCPool' failed to
respond to a ping. The Id of the process is 4500.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Ian

 

[Tarren]

Is there some other server in your environment that your app is talking to,
that has different uptime cycles.

In which case, it is not the first page load that matters, but the uptime of
the other server? What is your server timeout set to? So it seems like it
is on initial page load in the morning, but it is whenever the other server
is down for maint, etc, which happens to night time and they bring it back
up later in the morning than when your users try to use your site.

Basically, is your issue really related to initial user calls on the app or
is it related to time of day when the user visits?

 

[Ian Murphy]

There is a module which talks to a webservice, but the user has to step
through a series of screens before this webservice is called.
The initial pages at most open an access db and read a record (the user
reference with the app)

My problem is almost certainly related to the fact that iis fails to
communicate with the application pool. What is odd is the amount of time
this takes, and why the users IE which fires off this event but not my 4am
page crawler.

Regards

Ian

 

[JohnFol]

Which is fine. . . as it proves it's not the content or code on the page. .
.. .
You could always add a simple html page containing
<HTML>Hello</HTML>
to rule out any ASPX overhead ..

 

[mwalshe2000]

sharepoint sites slow to load

Hi there,

I had the very same issues and almost gave up, untill I installed sharepoint on another server where I selected run all servies as local the Network Sevice.

I had previously selected an A/D account to run the services.


The difference has been amazing, pages now load in no time at all.
Even the initial page load only takes 6 seconds approx.

Hopes this helps