I have an application that I recently upgraded from ASP.NET MVC1 to ASP.NET MVC4 rc1.
It uses the Webforms viewengine.
It has performance issues whenever Url.Action(action,controller) is used.
I can reproduce the issue in ASP.NET MVC3.
I need 3ms to render views that have 10 instances of the Url.Action helper in it in ASP.NET MVC1 and 40ms to render the same in ASP.NET MVC3.
I already found some ways to make it render faster:
I moved the default route to the top
I removed Url.Action and used static links
This does not feel right: the application is pretty large and I need the goodness of a decent working routing in it. I am also not confident that I found all performance bottlenecks. Routing is a central part of MVC: if there is something performing badly it will pop up in different parts of the application.
I have the impression that MVC3 introduced some routing features (like regex constraints) that even if I dont use them lead to a badly performing application.
Is there something I can do like turning of features of routing or using a different set of URL-helpers?
This code reproduces the issue:
Index action
public ActionResult Index()
{
return View();
}
index.aspx
<%@ Page Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage" %>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head >
<title></title>
<link href="../../Content/Site.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
</head>
<body>
<div class="page">
<%= Url.Action("Action1", "Controller1") %>
<%= Url.Action("Action2", "Controller2") %>
<%= Url.Action("Action3", "Controller3") %>
<%= Url.Action("Action4", "Controller4") %>
<%= Url.Action("Action5", "Controller5") %>
<%= Url.Action("Action6", "Controller6") %>
<%= Url.Action("Action7", "Controller7") %>
<%= Url.Action("Action8", "Controller8") %>
<%= Url.Action("Action9", "Controller9") %>
<%= Url.Action("Action10", "Controller10") %>
</div>
</body>
</html>
Route registration This looks strange: but I just want to simulate my not very complicated routing. This is not the 600 routes of SO!
public static void RegisterRoutesSlow(RouteCollection routes)
{
routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");
routes.IgnoreRoute("{language}/Content/{*pathInfo}");
routes.IgnoreRoute("images/{*pathinfo}");
routes.IgnoreRoute("scripts/{*pathinfo}");
routes.IgnoreRoute("content/{*pathinfo}");
routes.IgnoreRoute("{file}.gif");
routes.IgnoreRoute("{file}.jpg");
routes.IgnoreRoute("{file}.js");
routes.IgnoreRoute("{file}.css");
routes.IgnoreRoute("{file}.png");
routes.IgnoreRoute("{file}.pdf");
routes.IgnoreRoute("{file}.htm");
routes.IgnoreRoute("{file}.html");
routes.IgnoreRoute("{file}.swf");
routes.IgnoreRoute("{file}.txt");
routes.IgnoreRoute("{file}.xml");
routes.IgnoreRoute("{*favicon}", new { favicon = @"(.*/)?favicon.ico(/.*)?" });
for (int i = 0; i <= 10; i++)
{
routes.MapRoute(
// Route name
"RouteName" + i.ToString(),
// URL with parameters
"{language}/{controller}/{action}/{para1}",
// Parameter defaults
new
{
action = "Index",
language = "de",
para1 = 0
},
//Parameter constraints
new { language = "de|en", controller = "SomeNameOfAnActualController" + i.ToString() }
);
}
routes.MapRoute(
"DefaulRoute", // Route name
"{controller}/{action}", // URL with parameters
new
{
controller = "Home",
action = "Index",
}
);
routes.MapRoute("404-PageNotFound", "{*url}", new { controller = "Error", action = "PageNotFound", language = "de" });
}
EDIT
The sample code was compiled against MVC2 now. In VS2010 MVC2 can be compiled against .NET 3.5 or 4.0.
The performance with 3.5 is good and 4.0 is bad.
I guess this means that the poorly performing part is not in a MVC assembly but in a framework assembly (like System.Web.Routing.dll). The question is still the same: Can I do something about it? An accepted answer would also be: No, the code is slow because from version 3.5 to 4.0 MS changed XXX
EDIT-2
I decompiled the part of System.Web.Routing.dll that takes to long. It uses a compiled regular expression. There is a code path (constraint2.Match ) that returns without executing the regex, but I did not check yet if it internally uses a different expensive operation.
protected virtual bool ProcessConstraint(HttpContextBase httpContext, object constraint, string parameterName, RouteValueDictionary values, RouteDirection routeDirection)
{
object obj2;
IRouteConstraint constraint2 = constraint as IRouteConstraint;
if (constraint2 != null)
{
return constraint2.Match(httpContext, this, parameterName, values, routeDirection);
}
string str = constraint as string;
if (str == null)
{
throw new InvalidOperationException(string.Format(CultureInfo.CurrentUICulture, SR.GetString("Route_ValidationMustBeStringOrCustomConstraint"), new object[] { parameterName, this.Url }));
}
values.TryGetValue(parameterName, out obj2);
string input = Convert.ToString(obj2, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);
string pattern = "^(" + str + ")$";
return Regex.IsMatch(input, pattern, RegexOptions.CultureInvariant | RegexOptions.Compiled | RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
}