Do you think that only experts with a deep understanding of the inner workings of ASP.NET, SQL Server, and IIS can improve a website's performance? Think again - because this book tosses that notion out of the window. It will help you resolve every web developer's nightmare - a slow website - with angry managers looking over your shoulder, raging calls from advertisers and clients - the lot. You don't have the time or energy to gain a thorough and complete understanding of ASP.NET performance optimization - You just need your site to run faster! This book will show you how.

This hands-on book shows how to dramatically improve the performance of your ASP.NET-based website straight away, without forcing you through a lot of theoretical learning. It teaches you practical, step-by-step techniques that you can use right away to make your site faster with just the right amount of theory you need to make sense of it all.

Start reading today and you could have a faster website tomorrow.

Unlike other performance-related books, here you'll first learn how to pinpoint the bottlenecks that hold back your site's performance, so you can initially focus your time and energy on those areas of your site where you can quickly make the biggest difference. It then shows you how to fix the bottlenecks you found with lots of working code samples and practical advice, and just the right amount of theoretical detail.

The first chapter details techniques for diagnosing performance issues using Waterfall charts. Subsequent chapters then each focus on one individual aspect of your website, providing you with numerous real-life scenarios and performance-enhancing techniques for each of them. In the last chapter, you learn how to effectively load-test your environment in order to measure the change in performance of your site without having to update your production environment - whether it is a new release or simply a small change in the database.

What you will learn from this book

• Learn how to pinpoint and fix bottlenecks relating to all aspects of your site - server side, client side, code, images, and database.
• Ensure shorter wait times for your site.
• Eliminate the need to hire a DBA, by speeding up database access using insight into index structures and other advanced techniques.
• Drastically speed up image loading, by exploiting browser behavior and by removing the hidden overhead in each image file.
• Use ASP.NET's caching feature to dramatically improve performance by adding just a few lines of code.
• Prevent a little known bottleneck overlooked by most developers - a shortage of worker threads in IIS - by using asynchronous methods.
• Enable compression in IIS 6 and IIS 7 to cut file transfer times and bandwidth costs.
• Reduce your Memory and CPU usage.
• Optimize the deployment and usage of forms on your website.
• Speed up JavaScript and CSS loading.
• Diagnose problems as they occur, using waterfall charts.
• Load-test your environment to measure the level of improvement in performance.
• Find heaps of reference links and descriptions of free and low cost tools and services that make it easy to spot performance issues right away.

Approach

Written in a practical and clear conversational style, this book is filled with real-life website performance scenarios. It is replete with lots of working code samples and practical advice, and just the right amount of theory you need to make sense of it all.

Who this book is written for

This book is written for ASP.NET/SQL Server-based website developers who want to speed up their site using simple, proven tactics without going through a lot of unnecessary theoretical learning. If your website isn't performing well, this is the ideal book for you.