speed difference between lan and internet

[Jore]

Hello!

An asp.net site I have developed is dramatically slower when accessed over the internet compared to loading it from the localhost. Here is the deal:

Ive made an asp.net site that has been moved to production now.

When I developed the site I had it both on the local computer where I did the developing and on an intranet server. The loading times of the site were normal from both locations. I only accessed the site from inside the local lan.

Now the production environment is within a customers network and the site has dramatically slowed down. But this only seems to bother when used via internet. When I use the browser over ther at the server (localhost), it works fine. As an example a page that has a calendar control and a datagrid and some other controls as well loads in about one second. But via internet it can take as long as two minutes (which causes the page to timeout).

There is only a 10 Mb network adapter at the server, but when I look at the windows taskmanager networking tab it never utilizes more than 50% of the interfaces bandwidth.

Can there be something in the asp.net that causes it to handle requests from the internet much slower than from ie. localhost?
Of course Internet is always somewhat slower than using a site from the localhost or lan, but not that much.

I saved the slow page that I mentioned earlier and the saved it as an html-page with images and all but which does no queries or other functionality (just a saved copy of the source). I put it inside virtual directory where the site is and tried to load that over the internet and it loaded fast (normally). So to me it really looks that asp.net has some issues on multiple users or serving the pages to internet requests or something..?

 

[PlausiblyDamp]

What is the bandwith between the browser and the companys intranet (i.e. what kind of connection does the webserver have to the internet)?

 

[Jore]

What is the bandwith between the browser and the companys intranet (i.e. what kind of connection does the webserver have to the internet)?

The network adapter on the server is 10 Mb and the company has a 10 Mb connection to the internet. The webserver has the 10 MB connection also. It should be either connected straight to the internet or in a dmz.

I wonder if the slowness is caused by session handling or application pooling or cahce management or some not so visible architectural thing inside .net and/or IIS.
--Jore

 

[PlausiblyDamp]

Has anyone done any monitoring of the internet connection? If you have a 10MB connection is this being used for anything else (web browsing, e-mail etc)?

 

[Jore]

Has anyone done any monitoring of the internet connection? If you have a 10MB connection is this being used for anything else (web browsing, e-mail etc)?

They are currently checking the network traffic for bottlenecks and traffic. There are also other sites on that server done with old asp and they are working quite nicely. Maby they are not as heavy as this site, but even the lightest pages of this asp.net site load more slowly.

Also it seems to me that the slow loading varies by time. There should not be more than 10-20 users on the site who use it the whole day. So I am quite confused of the cause of this slowness.

-- Jore

 

[PlausiblyDamp]

Theres definately no reason why it should run slower when accessed from the internet as opposed to the local network other than available bandwidth. ASP.Net certainly doesnt cripple itself in that scenario.

Without knowing more about the network it is difficult to diagnose such a problem. If the server is in a DMZ (it should be) then checking connectivity / name resolution etc. from the DMZ to the back end servers is a good idea.
If the browser is trying to resolve back end server names directly (javascript, hrefs etc) then this could be causing a lot of timeouts if the names arent available in an external DNS server (or if it is using WINS or similar to resolve names)

 

[Arch4ngel]

Additionnally, I would check up the server its running on.

If an application is using like 99% of the cpu because of a really used website, that could be your problem. Make sure the machine is not using all the ressources for another web application somewhere on this machine.

What about the connection to the database? You could make sure that the connection are done promptly. But this is what Mr. Damp said check connectivity/name resolution of your server.

Give us more info as you go. Speed problem are always interesting to resolve.

 

[Jore]

The problem was solved and it was caused by networkproblems. The customer did not know exactly what caused the slowness, cause they had their ISP tackling the problem. But they told me that they had changed the networkadapter of the server to a 100Mb card and some router or switch aloso got changed. That got the speed up.

Asp.net did not apparently have anything to do with the slow performance.

Thanks anyway for giving me the confidence not to lose my nightly sleep over this .

--Jore