Use Roslyn to Boost Sitefinity Website Load Time

The loading time of a website is one of the most important factors for its success as visitors don’t love to wait for more than the usual time. If a site is slow in loading, they usually move to some other websites and that may be a competitor.

Sitefinity is a leading CMS that comes with rich features and functionalities and the latest release boosts the startup performance phase of Sitefinity websites and also cuts the time to about half of it in many cases.

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What Happens When a Website Starts?

When an application starts for the first time, you may observe the “please wait a moment” on the screen. Asp.net uses and therefore Sitefinity use a runtime compilation to compile the assets together and wherever there is a new page that is built or recycled, there is a longer wait time as the complier is at work.

So, it is very important to understand ASP.net application startup flow, as this will help to measure the performance in details. Here is how the whole process is divided into three prime phases:

The first phase includes the updation of the Temporary ASP.net Folder and it is executed after any deployment, rebuild or any other changes in the Bin folder of your project. It clears everything that exists in the Temporary ASP.Net Folder and then copies the new files there.

 

 

The second phase includes the Web Application initialization and that is divided into three sub-steps:

1. The application start stage
2. The Sitefinity startup stage
3. Sitefinity bootstrap events

The last phase is the initial page load and this is when the first page request is sent which causes the application to start. In any case the page in not already compiled in the temporary ASP.Net Folder, it is compiled dynamically.

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Roslyn the Rescuer:

Roslyn is the Microsoft’s new compiler and it is very fast than the default complier. It is at least 6 time faster and large sites have come down from 15 minutes to about 70 seconds. Roslyn works by creating some executable code fragments at runtime.

With this complier, it is all in the memory and you don’t need to mess with things that include assembly loading and file creation in case you are not interested in it. Roslyn compiles code files and then generate assemblies. it brings code analysis to a much higher level than ever before.

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Optimizing the Website Startup:

In order to optimize the startup time of your site, you can use Roslyn and it will help with improved startup and pre-compilation times. In the Sitefinity CMS, this can be done in two ways.

1. While installing or upgrading Sitefinity CMS 10.2 through the NuGet package, the Roslyn compilers is automatically added and it is referred as a dependency.
2. While working with the Sitefinity CMS Project manager, and creating or upgrading any new project, you have to manually install the package.

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How the page loading time can affect your bottom line?

Speed plays a major role in making a website successful and decreasing page load time can often drastically increase the conversion. Since every second counts, loading time is a major contributing factor that causes page abandonment.

Slower page response time often results in visitors leaving the site and looking for some other sites. Not only this, Google also puts weight on factors such as speed topicality, relevance and etc.

 

Related Blog: How to Implement ROSLYN in Your Project