First call to web service each day is slow

Question

While building this web service and the app that calls it, we have noticed that the first call to the web service each day is extremely slow. It even will time out on some days. However, every call after that work great. Can anybody shed light on why this might be and how we can get rid of this pain?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

If it's an ASP.NET web service, it may be the CLR initializing and loading and verifying the assemblies for the first time. You may want to consider pre-compilation

Answer 2

Agree with the other answers on caching, initialization, etc. As far as a workaround, one possibility may be to set up some sort of daily task (SQL Server job, Windows service, something else?) to simulate a hit to the service each day, so that your users don't experience this first slow request.