Performance Design Principles - Browser Client Considerations

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

Force the user to enter detailed search criteria.

By validating that the user has entered detailed search criteria, you can execute more specific queries that result in less data being retrieved. This helps to reduce round trips to the server and reduces the volume of data that needs to be manipulated on the server and client.

Implement client-side validation.

Perform client-side validation to avoid invalid data being submitted to the server and to minimize unnecessary round trips. Always validate data on the server in addition to using client-side validation for security reasons, because client-side validation can easily be bypassed.

Display a progress bar for long-running operations.

When you have long-running operations that you cannot avoid, implement a progress bar on the client to improve the perceived performance. For more information about how to make long-running calls from an ASP.NET application, see "How To: Submit and Poll for Long-Running Tasks" in the "How To" section of this guide.

Avoid complex pages.

Complex pages can result in multiple server calls to your business logic and they can result in large amounts of data being transferred across the network. Consider bandwidth restrictions when you design complex pages and those that contain graphics.

Render output in stages.

You can render output a piece at a time. The upper or left part of the output for many Web pages is usually the same for all requests and can be instantly displayed for every request. You can stream the specific part after you have finished processing the request. Even in those cases, the text display can precede streaming of images.

Minimize image size and number of images.

Use small compressed images and keep the number of images to a minimum to reduce the amount of data that needs to be sent to the browser. GIF and JPEG formats both use compression, but the GIF format generally produces smaller files when compressing images that have relatively few colors. JPEG generally produces smaller files when the images contain many colors.