I am looking to improve the performance of my site, not because it is performing badly but just as a general exercise. The usual suggestion for asp.net sites is to remove viewstate wherever possible. I believe this can be done by each control on a page separately or for the whole page.
My question is if I disable the page viewstate will this stop the viewstate of controls on a masterpage (as I understand it the masterpage is actually a control on the page).
Yes, the page is the originator of the page flow. Thus, disabling viewstate for the page takes the viewstate rendering out of the OnInit process. A better question would be why does disabling the viewstate for the master page do the same?