Why is MvcHandler.BeginProcessRequest() so slow?

Question

I have an MVC project, and I'm looking at speeding things up. One thing I'm scratching my head over is the BeginProcesRequest() which I have no control over. Using New Relic I found that this method is, on average consuming 90% of the time required for the transaction to complete.

The code in my controller is pretty simple. It has a look for an action session for the user and redirects to their dashboard if it finds one. there isn't any database calls on the actual page. The only written is:

if (Session["UserID"] != null)
// Perform actions

The BeginProcessRequest() method takes almost 4 seconds as you can see in the screenshot

This can't be something unique to my site? I'm using a small EC2 instance for the server, and although there are other applications running on the site the CPU and memory stay pretty much at 0 throughout the request.

EDIT - Reviewed the following post:

What happens in BeginProcessRequest()?

However as my application is idle when the most time consuming requests take place I can't see how it could be related to competing threads.

Answer 1

I think the issue was with IIS, as after I changed the property of idle time-out in the application pool to be one day it now seems to load much faster on initial start.

I also explicitly disabled the session state on my home controller, and ensured that SQL Server's auto close parameter was set to off.