fast asp.net websites

MANNING

Dean Alan Hume

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Fast ASP.NET Websites

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Fast ASP.NET

Websites

DEAN ALAN HUME

MANNING

SHELTER ISLAND

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For Emily — ngiyakuthanda

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ISBN: 9781617291258

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v

contents

preface xi

acknowledgments xii

about this book xiv

PART 1 DEFINING PERFORMANCE . .................................1

1 High-speed websites 3

1.1 Why optimize? 4

1.2 The financial impact 4

The business impact 5 ■ The search engine ranking impact 5

The mobile user impact 6 ■ The environmental impact 6

1.3 How to optimize 6

Profile 7 ■ Identify 7 ■ Implement 7 ■ Monitor 8

1.4 Where to optimize 8

1.5 The Performance Golden Rule 9

1.6 Summary 9

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vi CONTENTS

2 First steps toward a faster website 11

2.1 The basics of HTTP 11

Understanding an HTTP GET request 12 ■ Understanding

an HTTP GET response 13 ■ Understanding HTTP

status codes 15

2.2 Empty cache vs. primed cache 16

2.3 Tips and tools for interpreting performance charts 17

What does it all mean? 17 ■ Google Chrome developer tools 19

Internet Explorer developer tools 21 ■ Firebug 21

Safari Web Inspector 21 ■ HTTPWatch 22 ■ WebPagetest 22

Fiddler 22

2.4 Performance rules to live by 23

Yahoo! YSlow 24 ■ Google PageSpeed 25

2.5 Summary 26

PART 2 GENERAL PERFORMANCE BEST PRACTICES.........27

3 Compression 29

3.1 What is compression? 29

3.2 Why should I use compression? 30

3.3 Pros and cons of compression 32

3.4 Types of compression 32

Gzip 32 ■ Deflate 33 ■ SDCH 33

3.5 Accept-Encoding 33

3.6 The Surf Store application 34

3.7 Adding compression to your website 35

Using IIS to add compression to a website 36

Using a Web.config file to add compression to a website 38

Adding compression with other techniques 40

3.8 The results 40

3.9 Summary 42

4 Caching: The sell-by date 43

4.1 What is HTTP caching? 44

4.2 IIS and HTTP caching 46

4.3 Web.config settings 50

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CONTENTS vii

4.4 Caching considerations 50

4.5 Output caching 51

Output caching in an ASP.NET MVC application 51

Output caching in an ASP.NET Web Forms application 54

4.6 The results of HTTP caching 56

4.7 Summary 57

5 Minifying and bundling static files 59

5.1 What is minification? 59

5.2 What is bundling? 63

5.3 New bundling and minifying features in ASP.NET 4.5 63

5.4 Utilizing bundling in ASP.NET MVC 66

5.5 Utilizing bundling in ASP.NET Web Forms 68

5.6 The results 72

5.7 Summary 74

6 HTML optimization tips 75

6.1 Where to position CSS and JavaScript in a web page to

achieve the best performance 76

CSS 76 ■ JavaScript 78

6.2 How the order of styles and scripts affects rendering 79

The impact of duplicate scripts 81

6.3 HTML5 81

6.4 A note on HTML5 browser support 82

HTML5 asynchronous JavaScript 83

HTML5 Web Workers 85 ■ Browser support for HTML5

Web Workers 86 ■ HTML5 Web Workers in an ASP.NET

MVC application 87 ■ Web Workers in an ASP.NET

Web Forms application 89

6.5 HTML5 application cache 91

HTML5 application cache considerations 92

HTML5 application cache in an ASP.NET MVC application 93

HTML5 application cache in an ASP.NET Web

Forms application 96 ■ Application cache support 97

6.6 Summary 98

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viii CONTENTS

7 Image optimization 99

7.1 What’s the big deal with image optimization? 100

7.2 Online image optimization tools 100

Smush.it 101 ■ Kraken 101

7.3 Command line image optimization tools 102

Pngcrush 103 ■ Jpegtran 103

7.4 Image Optimizer—a Visual Studio extension 103

7.5 Using data URIs 104

Implementing data URIs in an ASP.NET MVC application 106

Implementing data URIs in an ASP.NET Web

Forms application 109

7.6 The importance of specifying image dimensions 113

7.7 The results 114

7.8 Summary 115

8 ETags 117

8.1 What are ETags? 118

8.2 Why should I change ETags? 120

8.3 Removing ETags in ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET

MVC applications 121

8.4 The results 122

8.5 Summary 123

9 Content Delivery Networks 125

9.1 What is a Content Delivery Network? 126

9.2 CDN options 128

9.3 Domain sharding 128

9.4 Developing with a CDN 130

ASP.NET MVC HTML helper for CDN development 130

ASP.NET Web Forms helper for CDN development 132

9.5 The results 134

9.6 Summary 136

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CONTENTS ix

PART 3 ASP.NET-SPECIFIC TECHNIQUES....................137

10 Tweaking ASP.NET MVC performance 139

10.1 Using only the view engines that you need 140

10.2 Release mode vs. Debug mode 141

10.3 The importance of a favicon 143

10.4 Utilizing a code profiler 146

MiniProfiler for database profiling 152

10.5 Summary 154

11 Tweaking ASP.NET Web Forms performance 155

11.1 HTML improvements 156

11.2 Web.config settings 158

Publishing your application in Release mode 158

Disable tracing if it’s not used 159 ■ Disable session state 160

Disable ViewState when it’s not needed 160

11.3 Response.Redirect vs. Server.Transfer 161

11.4 Utilizing a code profiler 162

11.5 Fixing the issue 168

11.6 Summary 169

12 Data caching 171

12.1 Server-side data caching 172

12.2 System.Runtime.Caching 172

12.3 What should I cache? 175

12.4 The sample application 175

12.5 Notes on distributed caching 177

12.6 Summary 178

12.7 Look at how far you’ve come! 178

appendix 181

index 185

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xi

preface

Ever since I began building websites, I’ve been interested in learning how to make

them more efficient. It’s a great feeling when you transform a slow website into a

finely tuned engine that makes people say “Wow!” In my pursuit to improve my web￾sites’ performance, I’ve trawled the net and spent long hours trying to find the best

techniques. Technology is constantly developing and improving, and developers are

finding newer and ever more ingenious ways of speeding up their sites.

If you’re a developer who is new to coding and website performance, the plethora

of resources can be quite overwhelming. Until I wrote Fast ASP.Net Websites, I hadn’t

seen a book that teaches the ASP.NET developer the exact formula, in a step-by-step

process, how to shave seconds off their page load times and drastically improve the

performance of their websites.

I hope you agree this is that book.

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xii

acknowledgments

Until now I never thought about all the research and background work that goes into

writing a technical book. This book would definitely not have been possible without

the help of many people.

Most importantly, I want to thank my partner Emily for her encouragement and

for sticking with me through all the early mornings and weekends it took to finish this

book. Every time my alarm went off, you never complained, not even once. Thank you

for all your support!

Sincere thanks to Jennifer Stout at Manning Publications for being the best

development editor…ever. Your cheerful attitude and brilliant work were instru￾mental in the evolution of this book. Thank you for always listening to my ideas

and being so efficient. Thanks to Michael Stephens for believing in me and in

the idea I had for this book. You guided me through each step of the process and

this book wouldn’t have been possible without your advice! Thanks to Candace

Gillhoolley for your help with the marketing of this book and to Rebecca Rinehart

for working with me on my idea for the book cover. Many thanks also to everyone on

the Manning production team for guiding me through the process and bringing the

book to press.

Special thanks to Sam Saffron for helping me review the MiniProfiler content. Sam

was one of the creators of MiniProfiler and helped me, even though he and his wife

had a new baby on the way, and he was in the process of launching a new website!

I am also grateful to all the reviewers who helped shape and improve the manuscript

during its development: Bryn Keller, Danylo Kizyma, Ivo Štimac, James Berkenbile,

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xiii

Jason Hales, Jeff Smith, Mark Sponsler, Michael Roberts, Onofrio Panzarino, and

Wyatt Barnett.

Special thanks to Robin Osborne and Tim Clarke for their reviewing help, and to

Adam West for his technical proofread of the final manuscript.

I would like to thank my family for their encouragement throughout the writing

process. You have been fantastic!

Finally, thank you for purchasing this book. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as

I enjoyed writing it. I hope you will learn valuable techniques you can use and apply to

all your websites.

Let’s make the web faster!

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xiv

about this book

This book is designed to allow you, as a developer, to get the best performance out

of your websites. This book delivers details, best practices, caveats, tips, and tricks to

improve the performance of your websites and reduce the load times of your web pages.

How to use this book

Every new chapter in this book is intended to teach the reader a new web perfor￾mance concept. As you follow along with each chapter, and open the accompanying

source code, you will be able to follow the steps provided to improve the performance

of the sample website. Each chapter in the book is also designed to work as a stand￾alone concept; that is, you can chose a chapter and apply just that technique and you

will improve your website. As we progress through the chapters, we will be constantly

improving the sample website and each technique will take the sample website closer

to performance nirvana.

Who should read this book

This book is for web developers who are looking to improve the performance of their

web pages. It is also for developers who are looking to dive a little deeper into web

development and understand the page lifecycle that is happening as a user loads their

website. This book covers fundamental techniques that are applicable to web pages

regardless of the programming language. The techniques that are covered are gener￾ally universal, but aimed toward the ASP.NET website developer.

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