Is ASP.net WebForms a CPU intensive platform?

Question

I work in an asp.net shop, and I heard today that the bottleneck on our servers is CPU. I had always thought that webapps tended to be I/O and network bound before CPU. Is this an ASP.net/IIS thing? Is it our code? Or am I just completely wrong about the whole thing?

Also, we do public facing social/commerce sites using webforms. It is not that the CPU load is a problem or anything, our servers can currently handle the load. I just found it suprising, since from what I understand about web applications, most of the time CPU is not the issue when it comes to scaling, especially on a compiled language with a fast runtime like .NET.

Answer 1

It is your code. There is nothing inherently CPU intensive about ASP.NET, and I would actually call in to question the research that was done for saying the CPU was the bottleneck, because unless you are calculating Pi out to the billionth decimal point on your web application, I see no reason what could be eating up all that CPU time.