So slow that site is down!

Like several others who have posted on this forum, my website, PersonalNewsletters.com, is often very slow. Same for the ClickOnce programs that I access through my website. I read some of the responses to those other posters, and invariably when the discountASP.net engineer checked the websites, they were fine. He then moves on to the next forum post. However, I don't think you're aware of the extent of the problem. Here are some things I've noticed.

- Speed here on the east coast is much better in the morning, before the west coast wakes up. My site was positively sprightly this morning, and now what used to take my ClickOnce program about 2 seconds is timing out. (I have not updated the site at all in the meantime.) My client programs are effectively down!

- If my site has not been accessed in a while, there seems to be a delay of 7 to 10 seconds when I wake it up again. After that, it performs better. This is true even when I clear my cache.

- My ClickOnce programs use a Web Service. Often, the first access of the Web Service times out (30 seconds?), but then the next access takes the usual second or two. To me, this suggests that the problem is not in my code, but in the infrastructure.

From what I can tell, discountASP.net is asking too much of their infrastructure. At this point, I am NOT a satisfied customer. When I have clients in my office and demonstrate my website (often in the afteroon), the delay just to bring up my humble home page is embarrassing.

Are you all going to do something about this problem, or am I going to find another host?

 

The delays after idle time are due to the way the application pool works. Your application is removed from memory after 20 minutes of inactivity (or when the application pool recycles for other reasons - such as high memory or CPU usage). When you make the next request, the application has to compile and load into memory before it will run, that's where the delay comes from.

The slower responses at the busier times of day are just a side effect of any shared hosting. You are always going to see those fluctuations on a shared server.

 

Yes, I realize that. But the problem seems unacceptably acute with discountASP.net. Shouldn't you load your servers so they can reasonably accommodate the peak times as well as the slack times? Right now, your performace during peak times is not reasonable.

I realize you're trying to provide "discount" service, but I think you've gone beyond "discount" to "on-the-cheap."

 

Nothing about our service is "on-the-cheap." Our hardware, bandwidth, monitoring, DOS and malicious activity protection etc. are all in the premium range when compared to our competitors (ask any host in our price range if they use Prolexic or TippingPoint, for example - you will find that none of them do, and both of those protections come at considerable cost). Sorry, but despite the "discount" in our name, we spend much more money than the average Windows host to insure stability and reliability, so I can't let that comment slide.

The server response times are fine during peak hours. If everyone's site slowed down to a noticeable degree at one point of the day you'd see tens of thousands of people here complaining quite loudly, not a small handful. When I talk about congestion at peak times, I mean a second or two at most - more typically milliseconds of additional load time during peak, not 20 or 30 seconds. And again, such fluctuations are to be expected.

Specific to your site, page two of your demo app wouldn't load for me at all after repeated attempts. That kind of time out is not server related (it's usually memory related, or caused by code errors or poorly designed databases, etc.). We tend to look at the application itself as a source of performance problems because the application tends to be the source of most performance problems. We aren't blowing you off, that is just the nature of using these technologies. They are not always the speediest boats in the pond.