w3wp slow startup / execution

I hate to post another "poor performance" thread, but this one is truly
baffling to me.

The first time I hit my web application (or Microsoft's - the same holds
true of the Report Manager web app), the response time of the server is
extremely slow (order of minutes). However, there is no obvious load on the
server. w3wp is there but not using up any CPU or memory. No other processes
are using up an unusual amount of memory or CPU. The server is basically idle
for minutes and then - wala - a response comes through to the original
request.

Things improve quite a bit after the initial load, but they're still slow
compared to my usual experience with IIS and SQL Report Server. How can I
look into this further? How can I find out what is going on while the system
sits there idling?

Ken

Re: w3wp slow startup / execution

Unfortunately, what you observe really has nothing to do with IIS. It
is the custom application or framework that you are running on IIS
that is taking a long time to start up.

Personally, I attach a debugger onto the worker process to watch what
DLLs are loading and "taking a long time" and then go from there,
directly debugging the process, but that hardly the easiest thing to
do.

Basically, you are looking for counters and clues and hope that the
"slow" code has perf counters and such that give you hints. That
completely depends on the code itself, so you will hardly ever find a
common solution to any "poor performance" thread.

People think the common thing is IIS, so it must have counters to
help, but they are mistaken. IIS can only measure performance of its
own codebase. When you use it to run something else, it is the
responsibility of that other code to give you such insight -- IIS has
no responsibility.

Now, ASP.Net has a well-known startup latency that can take a while,
but it shouldn't be minutes. Something else seems misconfigured,
possibly things that managed code is loading on "startup".


//David
http://w3-4u.blogspot.com
http://blogs.msdn.com/David.Wang
//




On Aug 9, 8:04 am, Ken wrote:
> I hate to post another "poor performance" thread, but this one is truly
> baffling to me.
>
> The first time I hit my web application (or Microsoft's - the same holds
> true of the Report Manager web app), the response time of the server is
> extremely slow (order of minutes). However, there is no obvious load on the
> server. w3wp is there but not using up any CPU or memory. No other processes
> are using up an unusual amount of memory or CPU. The server is basically idle
> for minutes and then - wala - a response comes through to the original
> request.
>
> Things improve quite a bit after the initial load, but they're still slow
> compared to my usual experience with IIS and SQL Report Server. How can I
> look into this further? How can I find out what is going on while the system
> sits there idling?
>
> Ken

RE: w3wp slow startup / execution

Hi Ken,

Please check the site's application pool property. Verify the setting
'Shutdown worker processes after being idle for(time in minutes)'.

The default setting of IIS6 is to shut down worker processes(web site/app
pool instances) if there is no new requests come in for 20 mins. In this
case, if there is a new request comes in after worker process is shutdown,
IIS need to start a fresh w3wp.exe and reload the whole application which
is quite a time consuming process.

This is a common case that users may see a *slow* performance for first
request on a test or developer server. However the idle timeout setting
will not affect a busy production server since there should always be new
requests come and be processed(no idle time at all).

Please update here if you have any further question or concern on this.

Thanks and have a nice weekend.

Sincerely,

WenJun Zhang

Microsoft Online Community Support

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RE: w3wp slow startup / execution

Hi Ken,

Is there any update of this issue?

I'm looking forward to your response and pleased to be of any possible
assistance.

Thanks and have a nice weekend.

Sincerely,

WenJun Zhang

Microsoft Online Community Support

==================================================

Get notification to my posts through email? Please refer to:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions/managednewsgroups/de fault.aspx#notif
ications.

Note: The MSDN Managed Newsgroup support offering is for non-urgent issues
where an initial response from the community or a Microsoft Support
Engineer within 1 business day is acceptable. Please note that each follow
up response may take approximately 2 business days as the support
professional working with you may need further investigation to reach the
most efficient resolution. The offering is not appropriate for situations
that require urgent, real-time or phone-based interactions or complex
project analysis and dump analysis issues. Issues of this nature are best
handled working with a dedicated Microsoft Support Engineer by contacting
Microsoft Customer Support Services (CSS) at:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions/support/default.aspx .

==================================================

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.