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We have an application deployed on Windows Azure as a Web Role and we are using Pingdom for testing page load times: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/

The url for the application on Windows Azure is: http://www.doctorspring.com . The load time of the app is usually around 7s. The database is an SQL Azure database and the role and the database are in the same zone.

Sample pingdom result: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/CllGggrMz/http://www.doctorspring.com/

Sample pingdom result(with gzip):http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/f2TUbR6OX/www.doctorspring.com

Suspecting that Azure could be the problem, we tried a free hosting from Somee as: http://www.doctorspring.somee.com The load time of the app on Somee is around 3.5s.

Sample pingdom result: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/o3gZOjTwH/http://www.doctorspring.somee.com/

That is a huge performance issue for us. Can you please help us understand the problem with Azure or suggest a method, as to how can we overcome it?

Thanks, Manish

manishKungwani
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  • I would use a profiler...for instance we use this: https://code.google.com/p/mvc-mini-profiler/ ...we too noticed Azure made the pages load billions of times slower, but once we profiler things heavily, took time out to performance tune, we don't actually notice a difference between our old hosting & our Azure hosting. – Arran Mar 14 '13 at 12:38
  • Lately I noticed the same issue with performance in Shared mode. Just switched to Reserved instance to see if it gets better. – z-boss Mar 18 '13 at 14:48

2 Answers2

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In both cases, loading the homepage is unacceptably slow - 3.5 seconds to generate a page is around 10 times slower than you need to be when there's no load on the site. I'd expect the site to crumble under even moderate load with this kind of performance.

Without knowing how the site is constructed, it's hard to explain the reason one environment is faster than the other - but my guess is that whatever is generating the page (some kind of CMS?) is the cause. Azure is known to be a touch slow when doing database queries - though normally this only manifests itself under extreme conditions.

I'd recommend tuning the CMS - especially with caching. We found that Azure is normally pretty fast, but when doing database lookups (e.g. retrieving content for the CMS), it can be variable; if your CMS is doing a LOT of database queries to get the homepage content, it's going to be slow.

It's also worth running Yslow - there's some low-hanging fruit on getting performance up.

Neville Kuyt
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  • Thanks Neville, I would go for a profiler alright, but if you look at both urls right now, the ASPX request is faster for the second url than the first. And everything that we could get off Yslow, is there. The point here is the comparison between the two. – manishKungwani Mar 14 '13 at 12:49
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What services are you running in Azure? Web-role, VM, Website? Are you connecting to an Azure Database instance from the homepage (if so how many distinct calls are you making)?. I'm getting around a 7.5 second load time from London, but to be honest even 3 seconds is too slow for the homepage. It's hard to know what's causing the prolonged page-load but if you are connecting to a DB instance there's a great deal you can do e.g.

  1. Render the page and make some asynchronous calls to spool in additional data.

  2. Make sure your Azure services are running close together

  3. Consider caching database content to a blob. E.g. for the data in "Medical Questions Answered in Last 24 Hours" if you are pulling this from a DB on every load you could considerably speed up access by routinely caching this to a html file stored in a blob container and inject it into the page.

  4. If you must make DB calls from the homepage try to make as few round trips as possible by batching up your queries into a stored procedure.

I've made a lot of assumptions here, but there are certainly things you could do to drastically improve performance on this page.

QFDev
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    I agree on those points and they are in the to-do list. However, the performance difference in the 2 platforms is the real question here. – manishKungwani Mar 14 '13 at 19:42
  • When you switched to Somee.com. Was the database still on Azure? – QFDev Mar 14 '13 at 20:19
  • No, I have the database on somee.com. – manishKungwani Mar 15 '13 at 02:42
  • If you were running the DB on the same box with Somee.com I think that could explain a large part of the difference. In Azure your web-role needs to shuttle data back and forth over the wire (and it's a big data-center) so you if you are making many distinct calls it's likely to run a lot slower in Azure. We had the same problem and had to spend a lot of time redesigning the way we interface with the DB. In the end we got many of our pages loading in a under a second with Azure and these were pulling in data from many different tables. Just a thought.. – QFDev Mar 15 '13 at 10:07