<compilation debug="true"> in precompiled asp.net website - Does it matter?

Question

I'm deploying a precompiled and all-page-merged website using Web Deployment Projects on Visual Studio 2008. Note that all assemblies and projects have been compiled in Release mode.

All my pages are pre-compiled in release mode. So they wont be recompiled, they'll just be loaded by runtime. In that case when the page compilation is not required, Setting <compilation debug="true"> in system.web will make any difference ?

Answer 1

Check out the excellent links below:

• ASP.NET Memory: If your application is in production… then why is debug=true
• Don’t run production ASP.NET Applications with debug=”true” enabled

Basically:

• Your code will run slower because of the overhead of debugging support.
• Scripts and images are not cached on the client side because you don't want things to be cached in development if you're constantly making changes and debugging.
• Requests are not timed out. Again when you're debugging your code, you don't want to get a request timeout.

None of the above is desirable. You will find more disadvantages in the above links.