Improving TTFB for ASP.NET Websites

Question

Trying to figure out why my website is so slow, it's an asp.net empty template using a bootstrap theme. Not using any database or Entity Framework so I am at a loss as to why a simple asp.net website can be so slow.

It seems to be the TTFB (Time to First Byte) is reaching upwards of 15-20 seconds. Sometimes the site is fast but often after some time the site will slow down, my understanding being that IIS is suspending the app pool.

The challenge is I am using Host4Asp and GoDaddy hosting, both have this issue and I can't access IIS to configure it as it's a shared hosting. I created the same website in PHP and it loads instantly, everytime.

I've implemented caching in webconfig and use the CacheOutput attribute on all my controller actions.

<system.webServer>
  <staticContent>
    <clientCache httpExpires="Sun, 29 Mar 2020 00:00:00 GMT" cacheControlMode="UseExpires" />
  </staticContent>
  <urlCompression doDynamicCompression="true" doStaticCompression="true" dynamicCompressionBeforeCache="true" />
  <httpProtocol>
    <customHeaders>
      <add name="Cache-Control" value="public" />
    </customHeaders>
  </httpProtocol>
</system.webServer>

So the question is how do you improve the TTFB of an asp.net website comparable in performance when you have limited access to IIS and you're using a shared host. Surely asp.net is expecting every developer to have a high performance VPS or dedicated server.

I've made a repo on GitHub containing the full solution code if it helps. https://github.com/devfunkd/zenwire

Answer 1

Hosting services will typically put your website into sleep mode if no one visits for a while. This might have something to do with it since you noted that the slow-down is only occasional, and improves on your local machine.