Overview of ASP.NET Performance Monitoring

Applies To: Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2003 with SP1

There are a number of tools available to help you test and monitor the performance of your Web application. Microsoft Visual Studio .NET provides Application Center Test 1.0 (ACT), which simulates a large group of users by opening multiple connections to a Web server and rapidly sending HTTP requests. ASP.NET includes a number of performance counters that you can use to track the execution of your application. You can also use the built-in ASP.NET tracing feature to track code execution for a page or an application.

ACT is designed to stress-test Web servers and to analyze performance and scalability problems with Web applications. For more information about ACT, either install Visual Studio .NET and open ACT Help, or see information located in the MSDN Library.

When you are doing steady-state running analysis, it is often best to ignore the first request and any one-time initialization costs for objects. For example, when requesting an ASP.NET page for the first time, there is always the cost of compiling an instance of then Page class. Once that has occurred, performance will improve for subsequent requests.

This section includes the following information: