Chapter 11: Performance

Chapter 11 - Performance
byJohn Kauffman, Fabio Claudio Ferracchiatiet al.?
Wrox Press ?2002

Overview

Given enough time and resources, a skilled development team should be able to develop an ASP.NET application that retrieves data in an efficient manner. To address performance properly, however, is to recognize that the tasks of developing and coding the end product must both be optimized. At the end of this chapter, we'll present a series of strategies for good and efficient development practices that ultimately result in good and efficient code for accessing data using ADO.NET.

To get there from here, however, we need to undertake a survey of different technologies and techniques, and come up with some objective tests. For the purpose of this exercise, the focus will be on data access performance, rather than on the performance of ASP.NET. We will cover topics such as:

• Handling connections and understanding pooling.

• Using performance counters and the PerfMon utility to measure performance and detect limits on scalability.

• Evaluating the usefulness of the .NET CLR Data, ASP.NET Application, and ASP.NET System performance counters.

• Determining the right situations in which to use a data reader rather than a dataset.

• Determining if and when it is best to migrate from existing ADO code to .NET, rather than upgrading to ADO.NET.

• Determining what style of access is best for retrieving information from a dataset and a data reader.

• Determining the performance gains (or otherwise) from using a typed dataset compared to a late-bound dataset.