Migration from Classic ASP to ASP.NET - Large Social Networking Website

A start-up faced with the 'good' type problem - an ever growing user base - called on Anuj to address their performance issues.

The Challenge

• Bottlenecks in current ASP code and SQLServer database had brought the production site to a crawl.
• The existing production code was extremely hard to maintain due to a mix of display elements and business logic in single ASP pages.
• The existing production database was hard to maintain as it had never been correctly monitored since its default setup.

The Solution

• 1) It was evident that significant cleanup was required at both the database level as well as the application code level.
• 2) Starting with the SQLServer database, various bottlenecks were identified. These included - poorly designed queries, missing or incorrect indices, excessive memory usage and excessive disk usage causing high CPU Utilization.
• 3) Transaction logs sizes were shrunk to manageable sizes, Each query was re-written, several new indices encompassing multiple columns were created. A maintenance plan encompassing re-building of fragmented indices, backing up and shrinking of large transaction logs was implemented.
• 4) Code Cleanup - A lot of database access code was duplicated in various ASP files. These were all separated into a common data access layer - using efficient ADO.NET datasets and datatables.
• 5) Common UI elements were identified and custom user controls were created. These common controls were then used across various web pages - allowing a significant performance improvement in page-load times.

The Results

• Moved Varsity Media Group from a slow (bottom 10 percentile) performing community website to among the top 25 percentile (of all websites) – by identifying and cleaning up software related bottlenecks.
• Provided a faster and cleaner web navigation experience for end users.
• Increased monthly user subscriptions due to improved website performance.
• Accomplished migration from ASP to ASP.NET without bringing down the production site.

More details...

• Contact Anuj for more details.