Simple IIS Performance Improvement 

I know that many of the readers of this blog manage their own webservers and i have a helpful tip to share about improving the initial load time of your webserver.  Although this modification I am recommending is a SMALL change and has a small impact, it is still worth doing as it will improve the performance and reduce the amount of work that IIS has to do.

IIS Default Documents

Depending on the specifics of your site configuration it is possible that you will have IIS configured in various ways.  For example if you have PHP sites as well as .NET sites and static HTML sites it is possible that IIS will contain many default documents.  These default documents are used to determine which page to load when a URL comes in without a file.  For example going directly to http://www.iowacomputergurus.com.  Now, this is page is actually served by Default.aspx, however, what does IIS have to do in this situation?

Well, the way that IIS works it runs through the default documents, in order, checking for the specific file.  If it exists it uses it, if not, it moves on.  My default configuration on my Windows Server 2008 box was as follows:

  • Default.htm
  • Default.asp
  • index.htm
  • index.html
  • iisstart.htm
  • Default.aspx

What does this mean?  Well it means that if a request came in without a file name that IIS had to check for the existence of five (5) other pages BEFORE routing the request to the proper location.  Since my site is ASP.NET there is no reason for this.  I moved the order around to place default.aspx at the top of the page.  Looking at my page load times I noticed that BEFORE the change a request to www.iowacomputergurus.com was served in 0.843 seconds according to FasterFox, after this change I averaged 0.357 seconds, which matches all other pages on my site.

Conclusion

This is a simple configuration change that can be made to your ASP.NET (or DotNetNuke sites) configurations within IIS that will net a small performance improvement for your main page requests.  Yes a small impact, but potentially on one of the most important pages of your site.

Posted by Mitchel on Wednesday, March 09, 2011
Tags: DotNetNuke, ASP.NET, General Tech
 

Comments

Actually you should REMOVE the unused entries. Why? Because from a security point of view if your site is ever hacked (I know - not MY site right :) ) many of the scripts that run might kill your page and put a different one in it's place or just place one of every flavor of home page in your root directory. If you only have the one you don't run as high a risk, since it's harder to replace files via script than to add new ones. So it's NOT a good idea to leave those other ones laying around unless you have a good use for them.

By Lee Drake on Wednesday, March 16, 2011 at 12:51 PM

Lee,

Great point.....

By mitchel.sellers@gmail.com on Wednesday, March 16, 2011 at 12:57 PM

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By maddy on Saturday, June 04, 2011 at 4:17 AM

This post has described about how to identify the bottle neck. One pasr of this post is the IIS setting for performance.

By Mitesh on Tuesday, November 08, 2011 at 12:01 AM

This post has described about how to identify the bottle neck. One pasr of this post is the IIS setting for performance.

http://howto-improveknowledge.blogspot.com/2011/11/performance-improvement-tips.html

By mitesh on Tuesday, November 08, 2011 at 12:02 AM

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