14 Tips to Improve the Performance of the ASP.NET Core Web Application (Part 1)

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Performance is the major factor for the success of any web application development. ASP.NET Core is one of the best platforms for high-performance web application development. In this article, I am going to share 14 tips that can help your web application perform better. Let's explore them:

Caching is a last resort

Projects that use multiple levels of cache often demonstrate a misunderstanding of why caching is required in the first place. Caching is not synonymous with performance. Your code should already be efficient. Caching should only be used as a last resort, after you’ve made all possible (and sensible) code optimizations.

Enable HTTP compression

Make sure HTTP compression is turned on for any uncompressed content. HTML in particular compresses significantly, and in this era of mobile friendliness and slow 3G connections, that’s essential.

ORM database profiling

Always profile your ORM database hits with SQL Profiler during development. ORMs get away from you very quickly. Before you know it, you’ve run a query 2000 times in a loop, when you could have retrieved all your data with a single database hit.

Lazy loading best practice

Watch out for lazy loading in ORMs. You shouldn’t lazy load any entities that could be retrieved with a single database hit.

Make sure paging is conducted at the database layer

You should carefully consider how paging is implemented. Many controls implement paging in a simplistic fashion, where the database is required to return all available data and the control limits what is shown. This strategy is fraught with performance problems, as it means that all the data in the given set must be extracted from the database (e.g. all customers or orders). Depending on the records involved, this could cause significant problems.

For better user experience always validate on the client side

To avoid unnecessary round trips to the server, validate form entries on the client using JavaScript before posting them. This provides quick feedback and makes your application feel more responsive. Always make sure you explain your validation errors as well. If you use complex password rules or regex patterns, include a message to explain what the rules are to prevent user frustration.

Always use asynchronous database operations with entity framework core

Use of asynchronous operations will allow parallel execution of the code. Entity Framework Core comes up with asynchronous extension methods that can be used to take advantage of asynchronous programming. You can find an asynchronous extension method available now for the majority of the linq methods that you use. For example, use ToListAsync() instead of ToList() to query data asynchronously. Similarly, SaveChangesAsync() is asynchronous variant of SaveChanges() method which is used to save data asynchronously.

Check Out: Part 2 of Tips to Improve the Performance of the ASP.NET Core Web Application