Must .aspx files have a page directive?

Question

Around 90% of the pages for our websites have no .Net code embedded in them yet are published as .aspx files. I want these to render as fast as possible so I'm removing as much as I can.

Does the .Net page directive have an impact on performance? I am thinking about two factors; the page speed for each GET and what happens when the file changes. The CMS system re-creates each page daily and I'm wondering if this triggers the ASP.Net compilation process.

Answer 1

If your pages have no .NET code and rendering speed is your goal, you may wish to consider changing the extension to .html. Any .aspx page will be passed to the .NET ISAPI filter by IIS and go through the entire chain of HttpModules, then will be handled by the Page HttpHandler. Using a .html extension would trigger IIS to process the request using the Static Resource ISAPI filter, which has a much shorter pipeline and is tuned for resources that run no code.

Answer 2

The <%@ Page %> directive is not required. Without it, the default values for Language and other stuff will be assumed.

By changing a .aspx file, it'll be recompiled (it doesn't recompile the whole app though) :

Any changes to a dynamically compiled file will automatically invalidate the file's cached compiled assembly and trigger recompilation of all affected resources. The next time a request to the code is made, ASP.NET recognizes that the code has changed and recompiles the affected resources of the Web application. This system enables you to quickly develop applications with a minimum of compilation processing overhead. (Note that depending on the change to the resources, the result can range from recompiling a single page to recompiling the whole Web site.)

Answer 3

Ok, put them in - just to be sure.

.NET pages are ALL compiled, page directive or not. nothing changes. Post compilation, they are as fast as it goes, as they turn into a class (type loaded once) that just executes.

Note that the post by Mehrdad Afshari is factually wrong (sadly I can not tag it). Any page change triggers a complete recompile AND restart of the appdomain. Acutally any FILE change does so, as long as it is outside App_Data and ASP.NET can see it (ie non-hidden flag on the directory / file).