Do you have any suggestions on how to speed up precompiling a Kentico site? AKA: the aspnet_compiler is VERY slow

Question

I have a Kentico 6 site that we have squeezed better performance out of by precompiling. We have a Team City Continuous Integration (CI) server that runs the build automatically on check in to the subversion repository.

However, the build takes 40 min! About 33 min are during the aspnet_compiler step! This is a pretty long time for a build that SHOULD take less than 10 min. I've gone through some of the various perf improvements such as moving the asp.temp files to a fast SSD. During the aspnet_compiler step, the server is using very little CPU, Disk and RAM. The CPU use seems to avg about 1%! In researching about aspnet_compiler, I have found many pages complaining about the speed, but a dramatic silence from Microsoft about it.

https://aspnet.uservoice.com/forums/41199-general-asp-net/suggestions/4417181-speed-up-the-aspnet-compiler http://programminglife.wordpress.com/2009/04/16/aspnet_compiler-compilation-speed-part-1/

I've come to (perhaps erroneous) conclusion that if I can't speed up the aspnet_compiler, then perhaps I can reduce it's workload. Since Kentico has lots of controls in the project, are there any savings that I can glean by remove extraneous controls? ie: if I run the aspnet_compiler for a project with a single page, it's quick.

I've also thought about maybe making the cmsdesk a separate application that only needs to be compiled after a new hotfix has been applied.

To recap: My two concerns are: #1 - can I speed up the aspnet_compiler somehow? #2 - If I can't, then I'm guessing I can reduce it's workload.

In relation to #1, maybe I can do incremental compilation, so that I only precompile files that have changed since the last build? I haven't found much info about doing this; there are a few unanswered questions on StackOverflow about this very topic - eg: aspnet_compiler incremental precompile Incremental Build aspnet_compiler

FYI - for those of you unfamiliar with Kentico CMS, It's a Web Site Project, with LOTS of controls - maybe hundreds of them.

Any ideas?

PS - I have a reply on the Kentico forums: http://devnet.kentico.com/questions/do-you-have-any-suggestions-on-how-to-speed-up-precompiling-a-kentico-site-aka-the-aspnet_compiler-is-really-slow

Answer 1

One thing our team did try to improve the compilation time was to remove the modules and set of controls that were not necessary to the project(forum, ecommerce etc..) to speed up the compilation time. Also, which approach do you use for developement, portals or aspx? as we've noticed that compilation prove to be faster in the portal approach than in the ASPX .

Answer 2

Everything I've read says that precompiling with aspnet_compiler is super difficult to achieve with Kentico.

However, I managed to find this post on Kentico's forums where someone appears to have figured out a way to make your system work for them (search for EHUGGINS-PINNACLEOFINDIANA on the page and you'll find it).

I have heard that using MSDeploy or MSBuild are a much more efficient way to precompile than directly calling aspnet_compiler (although I'm pretty sure both of those either still call aspnet_compiler or do the same thing it does, only faster).

I've personally never tried using any of these methods (and I'm pretty new to ASP.NET myself), but I figured I could at least give you some leads:

http://odetocode.com/blogs/scott/archive/2006/10/18/what-can-aspnet_compiler-exe-do-for-me.aspx

http://therightstuff.de/2010/02/06/How-We-Practice-Continuous-Integration-And-Deployment-With-MSDeploy.aspx

http://www.troyhunt.com/2010/11/you-deploying-it-wrong-teamcity_26.html