Recently I was tasked with troubleshooting a problem with one of our Kentico MVC projects that we were working on. The issue was that, at a high load, the performance of the front end MVC live site was not scaling very well. This was an issue that I had not really seen before in our Kentico MVC projects because typically Kentico’s API caching system does a really great job at making sure sites are very high performing.
As long as you follow best practices for Kentico MVC development you are usually pretty good on the performance side, well, that is until a client loads a 5 MB image file on the home page, but alas, that is a different story for a different blog post.
The root issue seemed to be that the Time to first byte (TTFB) was relatively high in the first few tests and didn’t efficiently drop as much as we would like on the primed cache hits. This was a clue that it was something to do on the server-side rendering of the page, before the HTTP response was even being sent down to the browser. And with any asp.net database backed CMS, this usually points to something being up with the SQL database calls that it takes to render the page.
Keep reading to see how I used the fantastic Kentico.Glimpse debugging tool to solve where the slowness was on this Kentico MVC project.