ASP.NET Best Practices for High Performance Applications

Writing a Web application with ASP.NET is unbelievably easy. So many developers don't take the time to structure their applications for great performance. In this article, the author presents 10 tips for writing high-performance Web apps. The discussion is not limited to ASP.NET applications because they are just one subset of Web applications.

Rob Howard

MSDN Magazine January 2005

When developing high-performance applications for the Web, developers often must choose between performance and ease of development. With ATL Server, new with Visual Studio .NET, developers get the best of both worlds. ATL Server uses a tag replacement engine written in C++, provides a simple programming model, and promotes enhanced performance and easy debugging. This article presents an overview of the ATL Server architecture, then creates a basic ATL Server project. It then goes on to explain processing SRF files, HTTP streams, forms, cookies, and header files. Managing session state is also discussed, along with file uploads and performance monitoring.

Shaun McAravey and Ben Hickman

MSDN Magazine October 2000

Imagine I have a class MyTestClass. And I need an instance of this Type throughout my whole web application.
Now there are several possibilities to accomplish this.

1. Make MyTestClass static, make it contain static methods only
Probably the most performant solution. I'm not feeling lucky about using static fields though. Thread safety? What if my static class contained a static System.Collections.Queue? Good idea? Bad idea? Better idea?
What's the best way to write into a Queue from many different threads at the same time anyway...

2. Make MyTestClass a singleton
Good. However I don't really like the idea of checking for an instance of a Type every time I call a method. Performance is an issue. Imagine for example a logging class.

Would it make any sense to store a reference to my singleton instance somewhere to access it directly? I'd prefer something like HttpContext.Current.MyTestClass.
Is this a common approach? It should be possible using the decorator pattern I guess... probably not that easily - I didn't look into it yet.

Any suggestions? :-)

This article discusses the Project Linker tool and other techniques to create applications that target both WPF and Silverlight from a single code base.

Erwin van der Valk

MSDN Magazine August 2009

See how you can gain efficiency in surprising ways by looking closely at your algorithms, the data they operate on, and the hardware you're designing for.

Kenny Kerr

MSDN Magazine October 2008