If you have done many ASP applications, I'm sure you've heard this before: "The application takes too long to load". Usually my first response is - "Excactly how long does it take to load?". Sometimes they have an exact answer, but usually not.
Here is the process that I use to start down this road to optimizing the application -- start with things that effect the application, but you don't control -- like the hardware and network.
- Find out what page(s) they are having problems with (this usually isn't included in the initial communication either).
- Once you have the pages you need to look at, get some load timings for the pages on your machine (make sure you close all your applications first)
- Go to the user's machine and get some timings for the same pages (close all their applications they have open first)
- Compare the timings
If the timings are pretty close, then go to Part 2
If the timings are not close, like mine were not ... start looking at the hardware configurations and network configurations.
Things to check:
- Ask the user if they have problems loading other sites or network files
- Amount of free space on the C drive
- Clean out the internet temp files on both machines (always a good thing to do)
- Amount of physical memory on the 2 machines
- Processor power of the 2 machines
- Check the configuration of the network cards (especially the Duplex mode and the Media Type)
- Find out a little about the network's structure (ie. 100 BaseT, NAT or any other items that might cause packets to take longer to get to one machine versus the other)
- Services running on the machines - use the Task Manager to see what is using the processor
I'm sure there are other things to look at, but this list is a good start.
Now run the timings again and see if they are close go to Part 2, if not - do some more research and try to figure out exactly why one computer is performing slower than the other.
Example: The first page I am looking at took between 24 - 30 seconds to load on my machine (too slow for me!) but on the user's machine it was taking between 2 - 5 minutes!!!!. After checking his NIC configuration, I set him to use Full Duplex and 100BaseTx and after a reboot, his timings are now close to mine...
3 minutes down to 30 seconds by changing something my application had NOTHING to do with. Now to try and trim some time off that 30 second load