Severe delay on initial load of web applications

[David Jackson]

Hello,

We are in the process of upgrading our internal web applications from v2.0
to v3.5.

A colleague has built a machine with 4GB RAM, 64-bit Vista Business Edition
and Visual Studio.NET 2008.

He has recreated the main web app out of source control on the above machine
and at first glance all is well. The conversion wizard successfully upgraded
the app to v3.5 and created the virtual directory on IIS7. The app compiles
with no errors and no warnings.

The app runs perfectly well in IE7 on IIS7, but the problem is that it now
takes over a minute to load.

At first I thought this must be something to do with the startup code, but
when I step through that it all runs fine. If I put a breakpoint at the very
last line of the startup code, it reaches it in around one second which is
how it should be. The delay seems to begin only after the server-side
processing has completed.

I enabled tracing, but of course that only traces the server-side processes
so that has not helped.

Next I wondered if the web app had somehow got corrupt or something during
the conversion process, so I built a brand new web application project which
did nothing other than display "Hello world" on default.aspx. Again, that
took about a minute to render to the browser.

Finally, I wondered if the problem might lie with IIS7, so I modified the
new web application project to use the Visual Studio Development Server
instead of IIS. This made no difference.

It makes no difference either if the web app is started in Debug mode or
Release mode.

Other sites both internal and external open normally on the machine so I
don't think there's a problem with IE7.

I found an article on Google which suggested removing the solution files and
then opening the project directly. This also didn't help. I didn't think it
would anyway because the problem also manifested itself in the "Hello world"
test web app.

The above represents the limit of my diagnostic knowledge.

Has anyone else come across this issue? Is there a fix or at least some
suggestions about what I could try next?

Thank you.

[David Jackson]

"David Jackson" <so*****@somewhere.comwrote in message
news:Ok**************@TK2MSFTNGP02.phx.gbl...

The above represents the limit of my diagnostic knowledge.

Another couple of points which might help but which I stupidly forgot to
mention.

We currently use Web Deployment Projects. We created a WDP for the web app
in question and used it to deploy it onto our UAT server which is running
IIS6 on 32-bit Windows 2003. Here, it starts up in a couple of seconds as
normal.

On the Vista development box the problem only occurs when the app is run
through Visual Studio.NET 2008. The web app project is configured to start
up with http://wks035/intranet/default.aspx - if I type that URL into IE7
outside Visual Studio.NET, it starts up in a couple of seconds as normal. I
can even type that URL into IE7 on another workstation and it loads
normally. Therefore it would seem that whatever the problem is, it concerns
Visual Studio.NET.

Once the web app has actually started up when run through Visual Studio.NET
and the home page has finally loaded, it runs normally after that.