This morning I had a call with a customer which reported a performance problem opening and compiling a VB.NET 2005 web application made of hundreds of files; we have a couple of hotfixes for VS2005 included in SP1, but the customer already had it.
He reported a delay in term of dozens of seconds to load, save, compile (doing anything) on the remote project, while opening it on localhost worked like a charm (so it was hard to think that Visual Studio was at fault here…); also copying a big file (120 Mb) from the server to the client just took the time of a click (the network is then working fine)… ?
To make the story short, I asked him to tell me step by step how he was opening the project: File > Open > Remote Site > http://ipaddress/application. Using the IP address here means the project will be recognized as Internet Zone (IE security) and additional security checks and restrictions will be applied.
I asked the customer to enter the server name instead of the IP address and everything was fully loaded at the speed of light! To be honest I didn’t though that this could have such a huge impact on performance… I guess also the fact that the solution had a lot of small files had an impact, since the security checks involved had to be repeated for every file (while with a big file we can have the same amount of bytes to transfer, but the security is checked just once).
Carlo
Quote of the Day:
Patience is the companion of wisdom.
–Anonymous