How to Improve ASP Net MVC 3 View Performance

What is a View ?

• Incoming browser requests are mapped to controller actions
• A controller action might return a View
• View handles the display of the data
• Most often the Views are created from the ViewModel data

How to Improve View Performance ?

Tip 01 :  Run in Release Mode

• You should always make sure that your application is Compiled in Release Mode

• Your Web.config file Must Looks Like below on Production

         <compilation debug="false" targetFramework="4.0">

         <assemblies>

        </assemblies>

     </compilation>

   Why This Needs ?

      #  MVC Will Not do any View Look-up Caching if you are running your application
            in Debug Mode

Tip 02 : Use only the View Engines that you need

• MVC framework supports having multiple view engines
• Can Configured simultaneously in your application
• And will query each in turn when it is trying to find a View
• In MVC 3 we register two view engines by default (WebForms and Razor)
• There is no reason to pay the performance price for something you are not using
• So make sure you specify only the view engines you need in your Global.asax file

         Global.asax  file Looks Like below :

      protected voidApplication_Start()

        {

          ViewEngines.Engines.Clear();

          ViewEngines.Engines.Add(new RazorViewEngine());//add razor view engine

        }

Tip 03 : Avoid passing null ViewModels to Views

     When it Happens ?

• You pass in a null ViewModel to a View that uses strongly-typed html helpers 

           Such as in the View :

              @model PawLoyalty.ViewModels.Product

          

      @{

                

              @Html.TextBoxFor(m => m.ProductName); 

       

       }

• This frequently happens in Insert (Add) scenarios

    Why is it Bad ?

• Strongly-typed html helpers like above,
• Will try to emit the value of the ViewModel using the provided expression
• However when something along the expression chain is null a NullReferenceException will be thrown,
• When the expression gets evaluated,
• MVC’s expression evaluator catches the exception
• But on a page with multiple such html helpers the cost of the exception adds up
• You can avoid that cost by always passing an instance of the ViewModel to the View

    Bad Way :

        [HttpGet]

        public ActionResult Add() //get empty data for user input operation

        {

            returnView();  //here the model instance defaults to null

        }

    Best Way :

        [HttpGet]

        public ActionResult Add()//get empty data for user input operation

        {

          returnView(new Product());//here the ViewModel Product has been sent

        }

Tip 04 : Uninstall URL Rewrite if you don’t use it

  When it Happens :

• Your IIS server has the URL Rewrite module installed
• When you are running ASP.NET MVC 3,
• None of the applications on the server are using it

            What is URL Rewrite ?

               #  Enables Web administrators to create powerful rules to implement URLs
               #  That are easier for users to remember and easier for search engines to find

Why is it Bad ?

• When performing URL generation (e.g : Html.ActionLink)
• MVC 3 checks to see if the currently requested URL has been rewritten by the URL Rewrite module
• The act of checking need significant computing power to solve (because it involves checking server variables)
• So if you are not using URL Rewrite you should Turn it Off (Uninstall)

                   How to Uninstall URL Rewrite ?

                       # Win 7 --> Controller Panel --> Programs and Features -->

             Important Note :  MVC 2 always performs this check.So turning
                                         URL Rewrite off  (uninstall)  will not make a difference

Tip 05 : Enabling Output Caching

    What is Output Caching ?

• Enables you to cache the content returned by a controller action
• The same content does not need to be generated each and every time the same controller action is invoked
• Caching enables you to avoid performing redundant work on the Server
• Can apply for either individual controller action or an entire controller class

   How to Do That ?

• Using [OutputCache] attribute

    Lets take a simple Example

    public class HomeController : Controller

    {

      [OutputCache(Duration = 10, VaryByParam = "none")] //cached for 10 seconds

      public ActionResult Index()

      {

          returnView();

      }

    }

   When to Use it ?

• Read operations Only

  When Not to Use it ?

• Writes operations.Such as Update,Delete and Inserts 
• Pages which are User Specific.e.g. shopping cart page

Summery of Performance Gain Chart :

                        Pages/Sec - How many pages can load per second

                        Page Time (ms) - How long will it take to load a page

                        Base - Page that has not done any performance gain operations

Conclusion

• You can see that highest performance gain can get by using OutputCache operation
• But OutputCache having its own Limitations
• I will explain more about MVC caching in My future blog post
• If your page is load under 1 second then you may not worry too much about performance gain

I hope this helps to You.Comments and feedback greatly appreciated.

Happy Coding.

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