Don't you feel like if Atlas is slowing down your sites?

Rate It (1)

Last post 04-10-2006 12:25 AM by LaZ. 6 replies.

Sort Posts:

  • Don't you feel like if Atlas is slowing down your sites?

    04-06-2006, 5:44 PM
    • Member
      213 point Member
    • Benton
    • Member since 06-13-2005, 4:57 PM
    • Posts 73
    Hi there,

    I deployed a non-Atlas web project to a remote server last week. I tested it over several days and it worked reasonably fast.

    Today I uploaded the Atlas-enabled version of the site to the remote server. Basically I added UpdatePanels to many of the pages and that was it.

    Now it is pretty obvious to me (and the users) that those Atlas-enabled pages are taking more time than before to load. And not just in the first request, it's in every request, in every page. The remote server is hooked up to the internet on a T1 connection and the users are over 512K dsl connections.

    Don't you feel the same? It wasn't obvious to me until the site was on a remote server.

    Thanks for any opinions,

    -Benton
  • Re: Don't you feel like if Atlas is slowing down your sites?

    04-06-2006, 6:49 PM
    • All-Star
      25,662 point All-Star
    • Luis Abreu
    • Member since 02-12-2005, 6:22 AM
    • Madeira [Portugal]
    • Posts 5,368

    hello.

    as has been said in the past, that might happen due to the way updatepanels works. i think that they were built so that you could easilly transform your page and perform partial refreshes without a lot of work. i really like the concept and it's cool to use on same pages.

    however, you should keep in mind that doing this will sent all your forms controls info back to the server. if you just add updatepanels without further considerations to the page (for instance, consider setting the mode to the conditional value), you'll have a loss in performance (note that in the worst case, you'll send everything back to the server and then you'll have to run some jscript code to reload the answer from the server; simply using an asp.net page will remove this last processing step and it might be quicker...)

    --
    Regards,
    Luis Abreu
    email: labreu_at_gmail.com
    EN blog:http://msmvps.com/blogs/luisabreu
  • Re: Don't you feel like if Atlas is slowing down your sites?

    04-06-2006, 10:01 PM
    • Star
      14,223 point Star
    • ScottGu
    • Member since 06-05-2002, 8:36 PM
    • Redmond, WA
    • Posts 2,004
    • AspNetTeam
      Moderator

    One of the things you want to check is that you don't have debugging enabled on the server (verify that your <compilation> tag in your web.config file has debug="false").

    By default, when debugging is enabled, the Atlas scripts are downloaded on each request.  This will slow down your page views.

    When debugging is turned off, then the scripts are just downloaded once, and then cached forever on the client.  This makes the download sizes of individual page views fairly small.

    The symptoms you are describing above sound like debug is set to true.

    Hope this helps,

    Scott

  • Re: Don't you feel like if Atlas is slowing down your sites?

    04-07-2006, 3:05 AM
    • Member
      19 point Member
    • LaZ
    • Member since 04-07-2006, 2:00 AM
    • Posts 5

    Hi there,
    I am a new user of the 'Atlas' project and have been playing around with it for a while.
    First I'll explain my setup.
    I currently have a multiview with 2 views. On the first view I have an UpdatePanel with its mode set to "Conditional", and a GridView inside it. It has a trigger aswell for whenever DropDownList1 fires SelectedIndexChanged. Once the trigger is set off, then the GridView is updated with the new data according to DropDownList1. When an item is selected in the GridView, a normal postback is done to itself and the second view is displayed.

    This system works flawlessly, however I too have noticed a decrease in performance. When testing this page from the dev machine, it has a very low load time of 0.63 seconds, but from a remote machine (on the same network), the same page takes 2.13 seconds to load. This is including the web.config's debug set to "false" and constant refreshing (with each load time being literally the same). When the page is going from the first view to the second view, the load times stay the same with both machines, even tho there is less information to be rendered on the second view. It is almost like the page is re-rendering the first view along with the second view.

    I took the UpdatePanel out and had the remote machine giving me the same load times as the dev machine.

    A few thoughts for the developers of 'Atlas' to think about!

    Any tips or extra information would be gladly welcome. Thanks!

  • Re: Don't you feel like if Atlas is slowing down your sites?

    04-07-2006, 4:24 AM
    • All-Star
      25,662 point All-Star
    • Luis Abreu
    • Member since 02-12-2005, 6:22 AM
    • Madeira [Portugal]
    • Posts 5,368

    hello Scott.

    well, though that might be problem, i think that you guys should also alert developers so that they know what they're up against when they use an updatepanel. though i might be wrong, i think that the updatepanel makes everything so easy (and this is a good thing), that most guys will just start adding them to the pages without any concerns on what happens behind the scenes. well, it's true that by just using it, you'll have a good looking page that doesn't refresh itself so that all the actions are handled on the server....but is this more performant than just having a simple asp.net page? if used with care, it might be....however, this is not what i'm seeing every day since most guys are just dumping the control on the page...

    --
    Regards,
    Luis Abreu
    email: labreu_at_gmail.com
    EN blog:http://msmvps.com/blogs/luisabreu
  • Re: Don't you feel like if Atlas is slowing down your sites?

    04-07-2006, 4:59 PM
    • Member
      213 point Member
    • Benton
    • Member since 06-13-2005, 4:57 PM
    • Posts 73
    ScottGu:

    One of the things you want to check is that you don't have debugging enabled on the server (verify that your <compilation> tag in your web.config file has debug="false").

    By default, when debugging is enabled, the Atlas scripts are downloaded on each request.  This will slow down your page views.

    When debugging is turned off, then the scripts are just downloaded once, and then cached forever on the client.  This makes the download sizes of individual page views fairly small.

    Thank you, Scott. Setting debug to false was a blessing indeed. Perhaps not as fast as the non-Atlas site bot noticeably faster than with debug set to true.

    Regards,

    -Benton

  • Re: Don't you feel like if Atlas is slowing down your sites?

    04-10-2006, 12:25 AM
    • Member
      19 point Member
    • LaZ
    • Member since 04-07-2006, 2:00 AM
    • Posts 5
    LaZ:

    Hi there,
    I am a new user of the 'Atlas' project and have been playing around with it for a while.
    First I'll explain my setup.
    I currently have a multiview with 2 views. On the first view I have an UpdatePanel with its mode set to "Conditional", and a GridView inside it. It has a trigger aswell for whenever DropDownList1 fires SelectedIndexChanged. Once the trigger is set off, then the GridView is updated with the new data according to DropDownList1. When an item is selected in the GridView, a normal postback is done to itself and the second view is displayed.

    This system works flawlessly, however I too have noticed a decrease in performance. When testing this page from the dev machine, it has a very low load time of 0.63 seconds, but from a remote machine (on the same network), the same page takes 2.13 seconds to load. This is including the web.config's debug set to "false" and constant refreshing (with each load time being literally the same). When the page is going from the first view to the second view, the load times stay the same with both machines, even tho there is less information to be rendered on the second view. It is almost like the page is re-rendering the first view along with the second view.

    I took the UpdatePanel out and had the remote machine giving me the same load times as the dev machine.

    A few thoughts for the developers of 'Atlas' to think about!

    Any tips or extra information would be gladly welcome. Thanks!

    In response to my own question... I solved the problem!

    I tested my application from another remote machine and found I was getting the same load times as the dev machine. This obviously meant it was something with the original remote machine I tested my application on. Turns out it was a custom firewall setting which I had created a long time ago. What it was doing was checking the data on every page before it was being rendered, this was to prevent malicious scripts being run on the machine. Therefore the 'Atlas' enabled pages had to use the dll in the Bin folder which made the page take longer to load, hence the firewall going to work. After disabling the firewall setting, I was now getting low load times!

    Hope this helps out somebody in the future. Smile [:)]

Page 1 of 1 (7 items)