ASP.NET 2.0 Performance Inspection Questions

- J.D. Meier, Srinath Vasireddy, Ashish Babbar, Rico Mariani, and Alex Mackman

Application State

• Do you store STA COM components in application state?
• Do you use the application state dictionary?

Caching

• Do you have too many variations for output caching?
• Could you use output caching?
• Is there static data that would be better stored in the cache?
• Do you check for nulls before accessing cache items?

Data Access

• Do you page large result sets?
• Do you use DataSets when you could be using DataReaders?

Data Binding

• Do you use Page.DataBind?
• Do you use DataBinder.Eval?

Exception Management

• Have you implemented an error handler in Global.asax?
• Do you use try/finally on disposable resources?
• Does your code avoid exceptions?

Machine.config

• Is the thread pool tuned appropriately?
• Is the memory limit configured appropriately?
• Have you removed unnecessary HttpModules?

Pages

• Have you taken steps to reduce your page size?
• Is buffering disabled?
• Do you use Response.Redirect?
• Do you use Page.IsPostBack?
• Do you validate user input?
• Have you set Explicit and Strict to true?
• Have you disabled debugging?
• Have you disabled tracing?
• Do you set aggressive timeouts?

Session State

• Do you disable session state when not required?
• Do you have pages that do not write to a session?
• Do you check for nulls before accessing items in session state?
• Do you store complex objects in session state?
• Do you store STA COM objects in session state?

Threading

• Do you create threads on a per-request basis?
• Do you perform long-running blocking operations?

Resource Management

• Do you explicitly close resources properly?
• Do you pool shared resources?
• Do you obtain your resources late and release them early?
• Do you transfer data in chunks over I/O calls?

Server Controls

• Do you use server controls when you do not need to?
• Do you have deep hierarchies of server controls?

String Management

• Do you use Response.Write for formatting output?
• Do you use StringBuilder to concatenate strings?
• Do you use += for concatenating strings?

Unmanaged Code

• Have you enabled AspCompat for calling STA COM components?
• Have you enabled AspCompat for calling STA COM components?
• Do you use Server.Create object?

View State

• Do you disable view state when it is not required?
• Have you taken steps to reduce the size of your view state?