Throughout the process of developing my Application, the first-response time has got worse and worse, It is now taking 10 minutes to load! I am using Web-Deploy to speed up publishing my changes, and from what i've read on MSDN, i understand that this delay is due to compilation and loading assemblies.
It's an ASP.NET MVC3 Application which uses EF CodeFirst, MVC-MiniProfiler etc. Im wondering if its one of these assemblies that is slowing things down.
Is there a way to track down the long running process plaguing my development/testing process?
As a side note, the issue is nowhere near as bad in the Azure Emulator.
Using Windows Azure SDK 1.4 and later, you have the option to enable Profiling for you application (beside the IntelliTrace). You can read about some of the options available (in 1.5) from my blog post here where you will also find a good screenshot showing the option to enable either IntelliTrace or Profiling. The trick is that you can only have one of them running (either ItelliTrace or Profiling). So I suggest you first run the ItelliTrace and inspect ItelliTrace logs for any exceptions during your application execution. Then do another deployment using Profiling to catch which are the most time consuming methods. Please note that enabling IntelliTrace /Profiling is only accomplishable during deployment process, and cannot be changed with simple WebDeploy, so you'll have to make at least two deployments for test.