Improving Network Performance

Application View State

By default applications built with Iron Speed Designer save View State object in a hidden variable on a page. For some applications, a page's View State can consume several hundred kilobytes, which causes application pages to become bloated in size and consume extra bandwidth for application users.  For application users on a slow line or especially for mobile users this increased page size can cause download delays.

You can configure View State to be saved in Session (Use Tools -> Configure View State -> Session).

Such setting will keep View State on the server decreasing page size. It has three possibly negative implications:

• Web Server memory consumption increases faster when number of concurrent users grows.

• Session time out or expiration event also eliminates View State

• Web Farm implementation potentially leads to loosing Session and View State when user redirected to a different physical web server

To resolve these potential problems consider:

1. Increase memory on server or use web Farm solution

2. Increase Session time out time in web.config’s <sessionState … /> node

3. Configure to save Session (with View State) in the ASP.NET state service instead of ASP.NET worker process which ensures that session state is available to multiple web servers in a web farm.

To achieve (3) follow instructions http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178586.aspx :

Step 1: Set sessionState mode=”StateServer” and stateConnectionString=”tcpip=<servername>:42424,

For example your sessionState node might look like the following if you run your application on a localhost (127.0.0.1):

<sessionState mode="StateServer" stateConnectionString="tcpip=127.0.0.1:42424" sqlConnectionString="data source=127.1.0.1;user id=sa;password=" cookieless="false" timeout="60" />

Step 2: Make sure that ASP.NET state service is running on the server used for the session store