R – Profiling CPU usage of ASP.NET web app – but not the database!

asp.netcpucpu-usageperformanceprofiling

I'm seeing consistently high CPU usage for my ASP.NET web application (on the live production box only, naturally….!) and I'm trying to narrow down the cause – it's basically maxing out a quad core Xeon box and there's no way it should be able to do that!

The CPU usage of the web process is generally higher than that of the DB process – which rings alarm bells to me on its own (?).

However, using the standard profiling tools (dotTrace, Red Gate etc) only show you the time spent in individual methods (rather than actual CPU usage) – and ultimately still highlight methods that are DB-bound. While this might indicate opportunities for caching or better indexes, I don't see how that in itself would result in high CPU usage of the web application process?

Any suggestions or tips as to how I can narrow this down?

Thanks!

Best Answer

Some suggestions to try at the first place.

1.Deploy with Release Build Check whether the deployed product is in release mode. By running in debug mode, lot of time is wasted loading the pdbs along with the assemblies.

2.Disable ViewState Disable viewstate if its not required. ViewState is nothing but data stored in hidden fields to be persisted between requests. it increases the total payload of the page both when served and when requested. There is also an additional overhead incurred when serializing or deserializing view state data that is posted back to the server. Lastly, view state increases the memory allocations on the server.

3.Disable Session State:

If you are not going to use it disable Session State. By default it’s on. You can actually turn this off for specific pages or for the whole application.

There are some basic ASP.NET application performance monitoring, check these two MSDN articles "Monitoring ASP.NET Application Performance" and Performance Counters for ASP.NET

Related Solutions

C# – How to get the CPU Usage in C#

You can use the PerformanceCounter class from System.Diagnostics.

Initialize like this:

PerformanceCounter cpuCounter;
PerformanceCounter ramCounter;

cpuCounter = new PerformanceCounter("Processor", "% Processor Time", "_Total");
ramCounter = new PerformanceCounter("Memory", "Available MBytes");

Consume like this:

public string getCurrentCpuUsage(){
            return cpuCounter.NextValue()+"%";
}

public string getAvailableRAM(){
            return ramCounter.NextValue()+"MB";
}

R – ASP.NET HttpWebRequest stop sending requests, high CPU usage

From your description, it is not clear to me that your high CPU utilization is related to your outgoing HTTP requests. High CPU utilization could be due to a bug in your code, a bug in CLR, IIS, or something else. Without knowing which component is consuming the CPU, you wont be able to do anything further.

If I were you, I would first try to attach a sampling profiler to the W3WP process, and see which component is consuming the CPU. That should point you to the next steps in resolving this issue.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

C# – How to get the CPU Usage in C#

R – ASP.NET HttpWebRequest stop sending requests, high CPU usage

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