Yahoo’s Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site recommends minimizing the number of HTTP requests during the delivery of a webpage because there is a significant amount of overhead during the HTTP request process for each file. Furthermore, CSS and Javascript file sizes can be “minified” by removing unnecessary characters, white space, comments, etc. The downside to combining files and minifying, though, is that it becomes very difficult to debug or maintain minified code. To get the best of both worlds, it is best practice to keep two copies of each file — a combined/minified version (for deployment) and a non-combined, readable version (for development). While this process would be labor-intensive with each build, we can implement a few simple tricks in Visual Studio to automate this process and achieve a faster end-user experience.

Step 1: Download CSSMin and JSMin

Read the rest of this entry » Compiling Multiple CSS and Javascript Files During Buildtime with CSSMin and JSMin in Visual Studio

While code optimization is a controversial topic, curiosity often gets the best of me and I want to know which method of doing something in VB.NET is more efficient.

Read the rest of this entry » Simple .NET Benchmarking

SQL includes a simple stored procedure, sp_who that allows for fast monitoring of SQL server resources by examining active and inactive SQL processes. Even with an efficient facade and coding style, sp_who can be used to assess performance in several different ways:

1. Detecting connection leaks – Even a well-developed .NET application can be brought to its knees with a single connection leak, causing the application’s connection pool to fill and prevent further SQL queries.
2. Assessing application load – How much of a resource hog is your application in a live environment? If you can identify SQL-based bottlenecks in your application, you’ll be able to optimize them.

Read the rest of this entry » Simple SQL Performance Monitoring With sp_who and sp_who2