It is a common scenario when a developer has to work on improving the performance of existing product built years ago by someone who has already left the company. In such cases, one may be in a dilemma on where to start looking for the performance bottlenecks. In this post, I am going to list out some of the areas worth focusing while trying to optimize existing code base in a .NET web application.
a. State Management
- Store light-weight, user-specific state in the client side using query string, hidden variables and cookies.
- Use static properties instead of the Application Object to store Application State because we can access a static variable faster than an item in the Application dictionary.
- Disable Session State if you do not use it. This eliminates redundant session processing performed by ASP.NET.
- Set the session state behaviour i.e. EnableSessionState to ReadOnly if the page does not need to update session variable values. This results in fewer database calls and improves performance.
- Disable View State if your page does not post back and the server controls are repopulated with every page refresh. By default, view state is turned on by ASP.NET.
