Hi.

I am investigating the performance issues we are having with Kentico CMS. We have developed a reasonably large and complex web site for a customer using Kentico CMS.

We cannot use the precompilation mode for Kentico CMS for the following reasons:
• Cannot create a new page based on a new template unless a developer builds and deploys the web site
• Cannot add a web part to an existing template unless a developer builds and deploys the web site
• The design of our app requires that we be able to create new templates in code so this would break in precompilation mode

Our customer requires – and I consider it reasonable - to have non technical staff make changes to templates.

Considering precompilation is not an option for us, I have been investigating the performance of our Kentico CMS project without precompilation.

I have found there are 2 issues with the performance of our Kentico CMS web site: data access and asp.net control compilation. The data access problem is solved using the caching capability of Kentico and I am happy with the way the caching works. However I am not happy with the asp.net control compilation performance.

After an application is reset, the first page in the site that is hit incurs a time startup cost. It takes a minute or two for the first page to appear. I accept this cost as it affects most asp.net web sites.

I have however found that every page has a time startup cost. So not just the first page that is hit in the site, but the first and second time every page is hit incurs a time startup cost. I can see from my analysis that every page has a web control for the page itself and it may also contain other web controls. All the web controls require compilation before the page can be displayed. Our time startup cost on all pages range from 1 second and 5 seconds depending on number of controls that need to be compiled.

I am not sure why it requires two attempts at compilation – it should only require one attempt. Both attempts seem to compile the same thing but the filename of the dll being created in ‘temporary asp.net files’ is slightly different. I assume this is a bug in the Kentico request handler.

Can you advise us on a course of action? Perhaps you can advise how we can speed up compilation? We need this web site to perform well without precompilation.

Thanks

Mat