You also have to realize that as you use the Web Control Framework you tend to build way more complex pages then you did with typical process class code because it's so much easier to do so as the controls maintain their state. But obviously the more complex functionality that is handled on a single page via postback that's going to have an effect on performance.
Ajax integration is one way to bring down the perceived performance as some parts of the page load dynamically after the initial page has loaded - but obviously that's a lot more work.
+++ Rick ---
While I'm in development...., I'm seeing 2.5 second hit times on my laptop.
It is not the newest nor the fastest thing under the sun but it not a dinosaur either; 2 Duo 2.4 ghz, 3 gb ram XP class machine.
But as I continue to add functions to this five tab page with several repeaters, modal dialogs and ajax callbacks, I'm really starting to wonder how I'm ever going to get back to sub-second hits.
Working in the WConnect 5.x environment is SO nice but are the features of ease starting to pile up and becoming a trade off for performance.
How much improvement should I expect to see by going to COM and pre-compling the pages?
Can't really comment on COM since almost all our customer sites run under COM so that's the norm for us.
In the early days of 5.0 I put some pages out that were compiled at runtime. Switching to pre-compiled seemed to help - but we didn't do any rigorous timing tests so I can't give you any specific results.
But you can't get around the fact that there's still some overhead involved in having VFP generate all that HTML. My slowest page is a form for international students that involves a number of lengthy drop down menus (selecting from a list of countries, etc.) - it does seem to take awhile to draw those up, even tho the page is pre-compiled. These are based on wwWebDropDownList controls - wonder if it would make a difference to fetch the data with Ajax and have Javascript populate the menus?
One way to make loading really fast is to hard code in VFP the HTML without using WC controls. A dropdown list is a good example, it only takes a few lines of code. But I guess before doing it, I would look at where the time is being spent. Add some "? SECONDS()" along the way through your page generation.
In my case the time was spread out throughout the entire process with no individual control taking a lot more time than any other. I just have a ton of stuff all going on at once.
Thanks for the feedback.
--hm
--stein
| Rick Strahl West Wind Technologies Where do you want to surf today? | Reader Version: 5.0 |
from Maui, Hawaii