ASP.net potential performance problem

Main page takes 10 seconds to display

[webworker us]

I'm pretty new to ASP.net, and was recently tasked with creating a project/task list. Essentially, it is a collection of everyone's tasks, what projects they are working on, and any comments.

The main page is a single .net page using the AJAX accordion control. It is a display page only...all editing is taken care of on separate pages. I give basic project information in the header as well as control buttons, and when the pane is opened, a gridview shows the associated tasks. The database is an access database.

With ~40 projects and ~180 tasks the pages takes 10ish seconds to load. That really worried me, especially with regard to future scalability. I tried checking the performance counters on the "server" (Windows XP, IIS 5) but they didn't seem to reveal the bottlenecks. Next, I tried two performance profilers, AQTime and ANTS with limited results. AQTime told me that my root directory had the problem (which I knew), but it wouldn't tell me where. I did notice in its event viewer that quite a few threads were created and destroyed in rapid succession, but I'm not sure why. I didn't attempt to multithread the application, so any threads it creates aren't mine. ANTS told me that most of my problem was thread blocking, but couldn't tell me more.

My big questions are:
1. How can I improve the performance of my page/find what is slowing me down?
2. Am I using the correct control? I'm wondering if using the accordion is part of my problem, and if I shouldn't be taking a different approach.

Thanks,

Casey

[Ocean10000]

First thing I would recommend is moving away from access to supply the information. Microsoft Access is not designed to handle this type of access. It can but usually it is the bottle neck. Microsoft Access is designed to be a single user DB, it was not designed to scale vary well. The threading issue's you are most likely noticing are probably around DB calls.

You can use the build in Trace options in asp.net to see where the slow downs are happening.
MSDN - ASP.NET Tracing Overview [msdn.microsoft.com]

You might look into refining the sql queries to improve the performance there or cache the data more if it doesn't change often.

[edited by: Ocean10000 at 8:21 pm (utc) on Jan. 30, 2009]

[webworker us]

I don't think I'll be able to move off of access for a while, but I'll keep it in mind as we go forward.

I'll try out the trace and see what it says, as well as refine the queries and cache anything I can.

Thanks,

Casey

[mrMister]

Let me guess, you're a Windows Application developer that's just decided that web is easy? :p