Last few days,  I was working on performance improvement of one of my Web Applications. I analysed my application in various ways. Also used different profiler and did profiling for my application using several profilers like Ants, .NET profiler etc. During analysis, I found few problems, that we rectified but got no visible improvement.

Later I thought, my server side code is good enough, but still its taking time to download the page.  Although we are already using IIS compression to reduce the page size, but still Page was taking good amount of time to download.

I posted a blog to enable IIS compression, Click the following link to have a look

How to enable HTTPCompression at IIS6

Actually,  My application is RIA application and we are using myriad  ajaxtoolkit controls in our application. I analysed my application using firebug and there are a lot of scriptresource.axd and webresource.axd files are gettng downloaded.

So I thought if we can combine these files into single that will a great performance application boost for our application.

First, I tried doing it from myself, Later I found ASP.NET itself provides a way to combine these axd files. Just you need to have .NET 3.5 SP1.

So if you are using framework version 3.5 upgrade it to SP1 and enjoy this feature.

I have created a small sample and will show you with the help of it.

So In my sample application, I have a Calender extender.  Lets see how many requests are there using firebug.

We can see currently there are 14 requests on every PageLoad. We can reduce the number of request.

So to  use this, first you need to download a ScriptReferenceProfiler. You can download it from here.

Now add the reference in your project and add the profile in the your page.

First register it as

<%@ Register Assembly="ScriptReferenceProfiler" Namespace="ScriptReferenceProfiler"
    TagPrefix="cc2" %>

and add it as a control like

<cc2:ScriptReferenceProfiler ID="ScriptReferenceProfiler1" runat="server" >
</cc2:ScriptReferenceProfiler>

Now when you run you application you will see the page as

Now copy all the link and put it in the CompositSctript tag as

<asp:ScriptManager ID="ScriptManager1" runat="server">
            <CompositeScript>
                <Scripts>
                    <asp:ScriptReference name="MicrosoftAjax.js"/>
	                <asp:ScriptReference name="MicrosoftAjaxWebForms.js"/>
	                <asp:ScriptReference name="AjaxControlToolkit.Common.Common.js" assembly="AjaxControlToolkit, Version=3.0.30930.28736, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=28f01b0e84b6d53e"/>
	                <asp:ScriptReference name="AjaxControlToolkit.Common.DateTime.js" assembly="AjaxControlToolkit, Version=3.0.30930.28736, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=28f01b0e84b6d53e"/>
	                <asp:ScriptReference name="AjaxControlToolkit.Compat.Timer.Timer.js" assembly="AjaxControlToolkit, Version=3.0.30930.28736, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=28f01b0e84b6d53e"/>
	                <asp:ScriptReference name="AjaxControlToolkit.Animation.Animations.js" assembly="AjaxControlToolkit, Version=3.0.30930.28736, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=28f01b0e84b6d53e"/>
	                <asp:ScriptReference name="AjaxControlToolkit.ExtenderBase.BaseScripts.js" assembly="AjaxControlToolkit, Version=3.0.30930.28736, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=28f01b0e84b6d53e"/>
	                <asp:ScriptReference name="AjaxControlToolkit.Animation.AnimationBehavior.js" assembly="AjaxControlToolkit, Version=3.0.30930.28736, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=28f01b0e84b6d53e"/>
	                <asp:ScriptReference name="AjaxControlToolkit.PopupExtender.PopupBehavior.js" assembly="AjaxControlToolkit, Version=3.0.30930.28736, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=28f01b0e84b6d53e"/>
	                <asp:ScriptReference name="AjaxControlToolkit.Common.Threading.js" assembly="AjaxControlToolkit, Version=3.0.30930.28736, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=28f01b0e84b6d53e"/>
	                <asp:ScriptReference name="AjaxControlToolkit.Calendar.CalendarBehavior.js" assembly="AjaxControlToolkit, Version=3.0.30930.28736, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=28f01b0e84b6d53e"/>
                </Scripts>
            </CompositeScript>
        </asp:ScriptManager>

Now lets run the Application. Lets check the firebug.

Here we can see the number of significantly reduced It’s just 4.

But this is sample and its working fine. But when you try to your actual application you might face several issues.
One issue that I faced while using with my Live application and That is

Issue: The resource URL cannot be longer than 1024 characters. If using a CompositeScriptReference, reduce the number of ScriptReferences it contains, or combine them into a single static file and set the Path property to the location of it.

So first I could not understand it and try to find to something on google. But somewhere found it’s a issue and it will be taken care or handle by own for the time being. But during analysis I found one solution.
The problem is the URL length is getting higher than 1024. So for this one has to reduce the number of files getting combined. So you can have more than one group of file and put it in different composit scripts tag.

I have added one script manager proxy and added a compositscript tag it in it and pasted almost half of the scripts in it. And it resoved the issue. As

 <asp:ScriptManager ID="ScriptManager1" runat="server">
            <CompositeScript>
                <Scripts>
                    <asp:ScriptReference name="MicrosoftAjax.js"/>
	                <asp:ScriptReference name="MicrosoftAjaxWebForms.js"/>
	                <asp:ScriptReference name="AjaxControlToolkit.Common.Common.js" assembly="AjaxControlToolkit, Version=3.0.30930.28736, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=28f01b0e84b6d53e"/>
	                <asp:ScriptReference name="AjaxControlToolkit.Common.DateTime.js" assembly="AjaxControlToolkit, Version=3.0.30930.28736, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=28f01b0e84b6d53e"/>
	                <asp:ScriptReference name="AjaxControlToolkit.Compat.Timer.Timer.js" assembly="AjaxControlToolkit, Version=3.0.30930.28736, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=28f01b0e84b6d53e"/>
                </Scripts>
            </CompositeScript>
        </asp:ScriptManager>
        <asp:ScriptManagerProxy ID="ScriptManagerProxy1" runat="server">
            <CompositeScript>
                <Scripts>
                <asp:ScriptReference name="AjaxControlToolkit.Animation.Animations.js" assembly="AjaxControlToolkit, Version=3.0.30930.28736, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=28f01b0e84b6d53e"/>
	                <asp:ScriptReference name="AjaxControlToolkit.ExtenderBase.BaseScripts.js" assembly="AjaxControlToolkit, Version=3.0.30930.28736, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=28f01b0e84b6d53e"/>
	                <asp:ScriptReference name="AjaxControlToolkit.Animation.AnimationBehavior.js" assembly="AjaxControlToolkit, Version=3.0.30930.28736, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=28f01b0e84b6d53e"/>
	                <asp:ScriptReference name="AjaxControlToolkit.PopupExtender.PopupBehavior.js" assembly="AjaxControlToolkit, Version=3.0.30930.28736, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=28f01b0e84b6d53e"/>
	                <asp:ScriptReference name="AjaxControlToolkit.Common.Threading.js" assembly="AjaxControlToolkit, Version=3.0.30930.28736, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=28f01b0e84b6d53e"/>
	                <asp:ScriptReference name="AjaxControlToolkit.Calendar.CalendarBehavior.js" assembly="AjaxControlToolkit, Version=3.0.30930.28736, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=28f01b0e84b6d53e"/>
                </Scripts>
            </CompositeScript>
        </asp:ScriptManagerProxy>

Now it will combine the resource files in two files. You can add more CompositScript tags if required.

Hope all you have enjoyed this and get benefited from it.

Cheers,

Brij