Scaling and Performance Optimization Techniques for ASP.NET Applications

Introduction
From the client's perspective, performance is an important factor to consider while building an application because if it is degraded from various round trips, resources, ajax, or server calls, it gives the end user no option other than leaving your site. To overcome this problem, you should always keep an eye on improving your app's performance by using performance boosters or best practices.

We all know that the good performance of web applications is what a customer expects. The issues related to performance occur when the number of users increases in the application or during load testing in UAT. And to fix this, you need to invest efforts toward making code modifications else everyone shall blame developers for this issue.

This is one of the major reasons why developers choose the ASP.NET Core framework for building error-free and secure web applications. It provides a stable foundation and adopts smart development practices to ensure robust software is developed. Also, perform timely checks to keep your app's performance up to the mark.

In this blog, we will know why developers are still using .NET and how to optimize your ASP.NET application performance optimization. So, let us get started!

Top 8 Performance-Improvement Techniques for ASP.NET Applications
Analyze Bottlenecks
The initial step for optimizing your ASP.NET application performance is to analyze and understand the problem area. The performance-related issues can stem from architecture or design issues that developers can fix. A few common problems that can impact your app are improperly rendered HTML, thread pool queries, and complex algorithms due to long-running operations.

Use Asynchronous Calling
The Async-Await Programming model was addressed in C# 5.0, and since its inception, it has gained immense popularity among developers. The applications developed using ASP.NET Core uses the Asynchronous programming paradigm to make the app faster, more reliable, and more responsive. So, avoid using synchronous calling and use Asynchronous calling while writing the code because synchronous calling stops the subsequent execution until the current execution is completed.

Here is an example of implementing asynchronous programming at the repository level:

public async Task < List < PostViewModel >> GetPosts() 

{ 

  if (db != null) { 

    return await(from p in db.Post   

                       from c in db.Category   

                       where p.CategoryId == c.Id   

                       select new PostViewModel   

                       { 

        PostId = p.PostId, 

        Title = p.Title, 

        Description = p.Description, 

        CategoryId = p.CategoryId, 

        CategoryName = c.Name, 

        CreatedDate = p.CreatedDate 

      }).ToListAsync(); 

  } 

 

  return null; 

} 

Also, start using await instead of Task.Wait and Task.Result. To perform this, follow the below-mentioned code:

public class WebHost 

{ 

    public virtual async Task StartAsync(CancellationToken cancellationToken = default) 

    { 

 

        // Fire IHostedService.Start 

        await _hostedServiceExecutor.StartAsync(cancellationToken).ConfigureAwait(false); 

 

        // More setup 

        await Server.StartAsync(hostingApp, cancellationToken).ConfigureAwait(false); 

 

        // Fire IApplicationLifetime.Started 

        _applicationLifetime?.NotifyStarted(); 

 

        // Remaining setup 

    } 

} 

Remove Unused Modules
Various requests are passed via HTTP modules of ASP.NET pipelines and reach the handler which servers the request. Then run a code to check the list of active modules, and the ones not being used should be removed to shorten this pipeline journey of the request that are unused. It would help you improve efficiency and optimize the speed of your web application. To eradicate a module, update the web.config file because HTTP modules usually do not come with a purpose. So, you can hire net developers to run code and detect unused modules without turning them off.

Use Response Caching Middleware
Middle controls are activated when responses are cacheable, making your code faster and optimizing frequently called code paths and store responses. The component is available on Microsoft.AspNetCore.ResponseCaching package.

Add this package to the service collection in Startup.ConfigureServices as shown in the box:

public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services) 

{ 

    services.AddResponseCaching(); 

    services.AddRazorPages(); 

} 

Enable Compression
Enabling response compression helps in enhancing the app's performance because less data is transferred between the server and the client. It compresses the file size as it is available as a middleware component that shrinks the response and reduces bandwidth requirements.

Here is the code snippet to add response compression middleware to the request processing pipeline.

public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)  

    {  

        services.AddResponseCompression();  

        services.Configure<GzipCompressionProviderOptions> 

        (options =>  

        {  

            options.Level = CompressionLevel.Fastest;  

        });  

    } 

We also recommend using ASP.Net Core’s built-in support for bundling and minifying client files to optimize web application performance.

Necessary ASP.NET Tools
You can find a variety of tools to manage your ASP.NET application a lot easier. Some popular tools are ideal for finding hot paths in code, .Net code profilers, windows performance counters, and a few other tools that provide metrics related to CPU usage, memory usage, HTTP error rates, garbage collection, and request queuing.

To fetch more accuracy in data, you need to create custom metrics that focus on relevant areas of your app, keeping track of custom metrics. Key performance indicators will work based on your pre-determined goal for performance optimization. You can use IIS access logs to identify slow and user requests to examine the optimization areas.

Optimize Data Access
One of the best practices for .Net app performance optimization is to enhance the data access logic. Apps depend on a database because they retrieve data from the database, process it, and display it. As the data is retrieved from the database, retrieving it becomes time-consuming, so it takes more time to load. To increase the app performance, you need to follow some techniques given below:

-Establish a cache for unchanged data.
-Calling data access APIs asynchronously.
-Decrease the number of HTTP calls.
-Avoid fetching data in advance, which is not required as it increases the response load and slows down the application.
-When using data for read-only purposes, use no-tracking queries in Entity Framework Core.
-Fetch the required data in one or two calls rather than making multiple calls to the server.
-Allow the database to perform filtering by using filter and aggregate LINQ queries.

Use Caching Technology
Lastly, boost your ASP.NET apps' performance by reducing the number of requests sent to the server every time. For this, you need to avoid calling the server and cache the data instead. You can also save the responses and use them the next time to call for the same response in the future if needed.

This is one of the most used techniques for caching that saves time and enhances the application's overall performance by reducing the server calls we make repeatedly.

To perform caching, ASP.NET provides effective techniques such as in-memory caching, distributed caching, caching tag helper, response caching, etc., for better performance.

Wrapping Up
Applications developed using the capabilities of ASP.NET offers a universe of possibilities for developers. After reading this post, you must have known that optimizing application performance is complicated and requires effort and time. To implement the suggested practices and boost the performance of your ASP.NET Core applications. Apart from these practices, our industry experts also recommend using certain tools such as Application Insights, MiniProfiler, Stackify Retrace, and Glimpse to measure the performance of your software, identify bottlenecks at an initial stage of development, and determine appropriate remedies to fix them.

So, if you plan to build an ASP.NET project but have limited industry experts, hire ASP.NET developers from a trusted ASP.NET development company and hand over your project to them to get the desired output.

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