ASP.NET startup Performance profiling web

Question

I\'m trying to determine the cause of a very long (imho) initial start up of an ASP.NET application.

The application uses various third party libraries, and lots of refe

Answer 1

Separate answer on profiling/debugging start up code:

w3wp is just a process that runs .Net code. So you can use all profiling and debugging tools you would use for normal .Net application.

One tricky point is that w3wp process starts automatically on first request to an application and if your tools do not support attaching to process whenever it start it makes problematic to investigate startup code of your application.

Trick to solve it is to add another application to the same Application Pool. This way you can trigger w3wp creation by navigating to another application, than attach/configure your tools against already running process. When you finally trigger your original application tools will see loading happening in existing w3wp process.

With 2-5 minutes delay you may not even need profiler - simply attach Visual Studio debugger the way suggested above and randomly trigger "break all" several times during load of your site. There is a good chance that slowest portion of the code will be on the stack of one of many threads. Also watch out for debug output - may give you some clues what is going on.

You may also use WinDbg to capture stacks of all threads in similar way (could be more light way than VS).