Consider having large ASP.NET web forms application with thousands of pages and controls with thousands of page views per second. The application was originally written in ASP.NET 1.0 and have been maintained since then. Today it runs using ASP.NET v4.5.
On a 24 core, 32 GB workstation, it takes 4 to 6 hours to precompile the website using the following command line.
aspnet_compiler -f /v / -p .\MyApp -d .\Precompiled -fixednames
CPU usage is limited to 2% to 5% and memory usage remains the same. In essence, the utility is not making use of the hardware.
When building it without -fixednames it takes approx 30 minutes, but intermittently fails with an error
Circular file references are not allowed
The due to the complexity of the application, refactoring it is considered too risky.
There is a lot of references to aspnet_compiler, but I can't find any pertaining to very large web applications.
Is there anything in particular you'd do to improve the performance of aspnet_compiler?
