How to improve startup performance on IIS / ASP.Net

Question

I am using a particularly slow virtual web host (name withheld!) where disk performance can be very bad. Thus, the first hit to my ASP.Net web sites can take 1+ minutes to load. (After initial load, it's all in RAM and fine.)

I am wondering if anyone knows a way to instruct IIS to pre-load the site? Is essence, emulate the first hit?

I have played with all the precompilation stuff, it helps, but it's not a substitute for the above.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Does your application need to recycle? All of the recycle options are in the IIS configuration and can be adjusted to be appropriate for your application.

The ideal scenario would be to remove all of the application recycles so that the application always remains loaded. Recycling would then only occur if the web.config file was changed or a new version of the application was deployed.

If daily recycling is required, as per the previous answer, a batch file could be used to recycle the application and it could also call iexplore.exe with the URL of the application to "pre-load" it.