windows azure website load time

Question

Sometimes when I access my windows azure website, the initial response time is very slow. After the first page load the website is fast. Some background: The website is not that often visited at the moment. Further, I am using a keepalivecontroller to keep the website running and the website is running in shared mode. I am wondering: are websites that are not that active removed from memory in windows azure? Or is it just that background tasks on the operational level of windows azure are interfering sometimes? It is not transparent for me what is happening, so is there some sla of something for windows azure websites?

Answer 1

There is now a new feature available for Windows Azure Websites in 'Reserved' mode that will keep your website warm. You can now turn on "Always-on" under the "Configuration"-tab on your Azure Website. As explained in this blog post:

When the new “Always On” feature is is enabled on a site, “Windows Azure will automatically ping your website regularly to ensure that the website is always active and in a warm/running state,” Guthrie writes. “This is useful to ensure that a site is always responsive (and that the app domain or worker process has not paged out due to lack of external HTTP requests).”

Answer 2

Easiest way to keep a website warm is to call it regularly using the Scheduler feature in Windows Azure Mobile Services.

You simply write a script in the Scheduler that pings your website every x minutes.

Here's a post covering how to do that: http://fabriccontroller.net/blog/posts/job-scheduling-in-windows-azure/