SP 2010: Developing for performance Part 8

SharePoint 2010 developing for performance article series:
In this series of articles I will briefly introduce you to some key concepts when it comes to developing for performance in our SharePoint 2010 applications.

This is part 8.

As most of you know, in any ASP.NET project (SharePoint included) there’s something you know as ViewState. With the ViewState we can persist state of our properties in the page controls and objects across postbacks that happen in our solutions. If we are not careful and plan the usage of ViewState properly, we can end up with a performance hit that will slightly decrease the performance in the page rendering process.

In this article we will take a look at what impact the ViewState can have if we “forget about it”, and of course how we can prevent our pages from being unnecessarily big in page size.

ViewState in our SharePoint projects

If you’ve been developing SharePoint projects of any type, you’ve most certainly been doing some kind of asp.net UI development as well. (Application Pages, Web Parts, User Controls and so on) that are inheriting the asp.net capabilities and hence the ViewState.

What you should know as an ASP.NET developer: Be sure to know when you should, or shouldn’t use the ViewState. You can disable the usage of ViewState for certain components, or the entire page.

Performance considerations

With an increased ViewState you get an increased Page Size which in turn obviously means that the page will take a bit longer to render.

We’ll take a quick look at how the performance can differ when we’re using ViewState and when we’re disabling the ViewState in a SharePoint project.

Taking a look: ViewState

In order for us to really understand what impact the ViewState can have on the page rendering process, we’ll dig into the details of the what the ViewState looks like. To do this we can check out the source of the rendered page, and of course we’ll rely on our faithful squire; Fiddler2.

Before we’ll start digging with the Fiddler2-application, we can simply check the Page Source of any given page being rendered and we’ll most likely find a heap of ViewState madness going on in there.

In my sample application that only consist of a simple GridView control and a few rows of data – the ViewState is turned into this:

<inputtype= "hidden "
name= "__VIEWSTATE "
id= "__VIEWSTATE "
value= "/wEPDwULLTE5NjIxMzI1MDIPZBYCZg9kFgICAQ9kFgQCAQ9kFgICDw9kFgJmD2QWAgIBD
w8WAh4HVmlzaWJsZWdkZAIDD2QWBgIRD2QWBGYPZBYEAgEPZBYCZg9kFgQCAg9kFgYCAQ8WAh8Aa
GQCAw8WCB4TQ2xpZW50T25DbGlja1NjcmlwdAVdamF2YVNjcmlwdDpDb3JlSW52b2tlKCdUYWtlT
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QRIb21lZGnihW5zRhNmmnQef2E5KXJlKgIU" />

If you compare the aforementioned ViewState with the very same page but with the ViewState disabled, it would look like this:

<inputtype="hidden"
name="__VIEWSTATE"
id="__VIEWSTATE"
value="/wEPDwULLTE5NjIxMzI1MDJkGAIFH2N0bDAwJFBsYWNlSG9sZGVy
TWFpbiRHcmlkVmlldzEPPCsACgEIAilkBUdjdGwwMCRQbGFjZUhvbGRlclR
vcE5hdkJhciRQbGFjZUhvbGRlckhvcml6b250YWxOYXYkVG9wTmF2aWdhdG
lvbk1lbnVWNA8PZAUESG9tZWTEsK7AlAZmIZYt/bke1dmkbPKxhg=="/>

What impact can these few lines of markup have on the page rendering process anyway, you say? Well, in order to find out – let’s summon our good friend Fiddler2 and do a quick comparison.

View state enabled:

Body size: 14,534 bytes.
Load time: 0.3765430 seconds.

ViewState Disabled:

Body size: 12,883 bytes.
Load time: 0.2031263 seconds.

A visual comparison of the same page with versus without ViewState enabled:

Body Size comparison (bytes)	Load Time comparison (seconds)

So, what can I do to tune and tweak the ViewState?

There are generally two good initial tips for tuning the ViewState.

Disable ViewState for the entire page
Disable ViewState for selected components

The first option is good if you don’t need to use ViewState in any of the components on your page. Then you can simply disable ViewState by setting the ViewStateEnabled property to false:

<%@PageLanguage="C#"
AutoEventWireup="true"
CodeBehind="ViewStateSample.aspx.cs"
Inherits="Zimmergren.Samples.ViewState.ViewStateSample"
DynamicMasterPageFile="~masterurl/default.master"
EnableViewState="false" %>

The second option is good if you need the ViewState for certain components, but you want to disable it for others. You can disable the ViewState for specific components;

<asp:GridViewID="GridView1"
runat="server"
AutoGenerateColumns="False"
AllowSorting="true"
AllowPaging="true"
PageSize="25"
EnableViewState="false"
/>

Additional Tip: Take a look at HTTP compression

In addition to being aware of the ViewState in any asp.net project, you should take a look at HTTP Compression that you can enable in IIS.

Read more: HTTP Compression

Summary

Alright – the summer is officially over (at least of you take a look at the recent weather) and I’m back in the saddle. In this article I’ve been talking a bit about how the ViewState can impact your performance in any asp.net project (hence SharePoint project). The reason for talking about it is that I’ve seen quite the number of projects as of late that doesn’t think about the impact a huge ViewState can have on the time it takes to download and render a page on the client.

An important consideration that I’ve learned throughout all our projects to create Internet-facing sites based on SharePoint (or plain old ASP.NET) is to measure the performance in different scenarios, including some stress testing and load tests. In most of these projects we’ve seen an increased performance if we take time to select what components or pages should disable ViewState. It might be worth considering.

Note that this is a minimal sample with minimal impact. Consider when you’ve got a huge page with 10+ Web Parts and all using the ViewState, even if they don’t really need to – can you imagine the page load times increasing? The answer is probably yes :-)

Enjoy.

Related articles in series