Build Ultra-Fast web sites

Welcome

I specialize in architecting and building fast and scalable web sites, and in consulting regarding various aspects of web development projects.

This site is, in part, a demonstration of some of the architectural and performance principals that I advocate. The site is new as of Nov 2009, and is still in active development.

Ultra‑Fast ASP.NET

This is also the companion site for my book: Ultra-Fast ASP.NET: Build Ultra-Fast and Ultra-Scalable web sites using ASP.NET and SQL Server, published by Apress.

You will find links to related information and tools here, and more.

Update: 17 Jan 2010

I deployed the initial version of my simple-but-fast CMS, using VirtualPathProvider. It allows me to add new content without reloading the entire site. The cool part is that the database holds entire pages and their code-behind. After the pages are read from disk, they are compiled and cached by the runtime. This allows them to contain controls and other dynamic aspects, rather than just having static content. In addition, they can now be indexed and searched by SQL Server.

Another cool aspect of my implementation is that the cached pages are replaced automatically when the database is updated. So, no restarts or other hacks are needed when the content changes. I still have a few admin-related improvements left to go, but enough is working now that I'm going to start using it for real content. I will be moving my content pages into the DB next, and will add search support after that.

Also, this update fixed a very odd problem that I still can't fully explain. Apparently, in some scenarios, when the home page redirects to ~/p/default.aspx, IIS was returning a page with Content-Type: application/xhtml, which worked fine with Firefox, but would cause IE8 to hang. If you navigated directly to the target page, the content type was text/html, as it should be. I've read about something similar happening with pages declared using DOCTYPE Strict, but these pages use Transitional, so I don't have a good explanation. Even worse, the problem seems to have gone away on its own after the recent update, with no specific fix on my part. Something tells me that it's not really over yet. Sigh.

Update: 18 Dec 2009

I was checking out the site's stats on Google's Webmaster Tools site today. According to them, as of 2 Dec 2009, pages from this site were loading in an average of 0.5 sec, which is faster than 96% of all sites. Google measures that number from the client side, using the Google Toolbar. It will be interesting to see if I can improve it further, although there's a good chance that router hops, Internet weather, etc, will start to dominate at around that speed. Might need a CDN to do much better.

Update: 11 Dec 2009

Added an article on avoiding errors caused by generating robots.txt from within Visual Studio.

Update: 10 Dec 2009

Added more detailed services description pages. Added the code download zip file for the book. Added an (old) article on Enterprise class software. Completed the first-pass migration to UltraDNS, although I think I may still have some tuning left to go.

Update: 1 Dec 2009

I'm starting to migrate DNS for this site to UltraDNS to help maximize performance in that area as I describe in my book. Since their fees are based in part on the number of queries, I'm trying to minimize the load by moving some resource records to other domains, such as the mail servers. I also had several other domains using a local DNS server that's registered in this domain, so I've moved those NS records too.