Talk at ConFoo 2017 in Montreal.

1. Introduction to Performance
Optimization of .NET web
apps

2. About me
 Developer/DevOps at Amilia
 Optimization, scaling, monitoring, SQL Server, Elastic Search
 Editor at InfoQ.com, writing about .NET and F#
 @plmaheu

3. In this talk
 What does “performance optimization” mean?
 Tools of the trade
 Focused on the server side

4. What does “performance” means?
 Depends on how it is measured.
 What interest us is response time (measured in ms) and
resource utilisation (CPU, memory, disk, bandwidth)

5. The method everybody knows:
Guessing
 Tempting to try to optimize code out of a gut feeling
 Unlikely to get it right more than 5-10% of the time
 The possible causes are endless: code, third party library, web
server, CDN, DNS, bandwitdh, ISP, hardware, etc.

6. Ahmdal’s law
Regardless the magnitude of an improvement, the theoretical speedup of a task is
always limited by the part of the task that cannot benefit from the improvement.
TL;DR: Optimize the right thing.

7. That SQL query is slow. So what?

8. Time to optimize
 Measure everything, all the time. Knowing precisely what is slow is key to
efficient performance optimization.
 Stopping profiling too early and fixing the wrong problem is an easy trap
to fall into.

9. Optimize what?
 Optimizing the the right thing: trickier than it sounds
 Libraries often have overhead on first call (razor view compilation,
scanning an object with reflection, data caching, library caching.
 SQL queries: Parametrized queries, locks, data not in cache
 Tip: Run your request a few times times to get consistent timings.

10. Not all bottlenecks are created equals
 Different application types lead to different bottlenecks
 Uncommon performance issues in unoptimized code:
 Garbage Collection
 Hitting concurrent request limit, default in asp.net is 12 * cores (async)
 Minor innefficiencies like an extra if condition

11. Different issues at different scales.
1s Upload a file to third party cloud service
10ms to100ms SQL Queries
1ms Regex match
0,001ms Get a property through reflection
0,000,001ms Multiplying two numbers together
A file upload may look slow, but a thousand SQL queries is slower.

12. Tooling

13. Some numbers: Amilia
 2 million pageviews per month
 Between 10 to 20 million requests per month
 Usual throughput : 300 to 500 requests per minute
 During registrations: Anywhere from 1,000 to 12,000 rpm
 SQL: 100,000+ queries per minute in peaks
 Avg. execution time: 100 ms
Note: Static files (js, css, html) are not included, served directly from CDN

14. Application Performance Monitoring
Provides a clear picture of what’s happening in production.
Data can be used as a starting point to reproduce an issue
locally.
 Stackify Retrace
 New Relic APM
 App Dynamics
 Application Insights

16. Lightweight code profilers
Provide live performance data on both dev and production systems.
 MiniProfiler
 Glimpse
 Prefix

17. Example: MiniProfiler

18. Compared to an optimized page
www.amilia.com/store/en/amilia-customer-
success/shop/programs/17513

19. Code Profilers
Gives highest degree of details.
Impractical for production, significant overhead.
 Redgate ANTS
 JetBrains dotTrace

20. Taken with ANTS

21. I/O: Third-party services and systems must be monitored, even if control over them is limited.
Databases, CDN, payment processor, etc.
Service Map and Database tabs in New Relic

22. Follow best practices
 Issues can often be avoided by taking a quick look at best practices for a
library
 Difficult and time consuming to find
Examples:
 IIS and HTTPS -> Offload to a load balancer
 NHibernate -> Avoid implicit transactions
 SQL Server -> Too many to name them

23. To sum it up
 Measure before, during and after changing code
 Optimizing without measuring is like fixing a bug without testing
 Various tools are at your disposal, each giving visibility on some level
 Article with links to the tools: https://www.infoq.com/articles/dotnet-
performance-monitoring-optimization

24. Questions?