ASP.NET MVC rendering seems slow

Question

I've created a brand new MVC4 web application in Visual Studio, and done nothing more with it than add a Home controller and a "Hello world" index view for it. I then installed the MiniProfiler NuGet package and put the necessary couple of lines in _Layout.cshtml. This is what I get when I run the site in Release mode (hosted in IIS):

The rendering time varies by pageload, but 130ms is about as fast as it gets. This seems a bit slow to me, as I've seen other people who get pages rendered in 30ms or quicker. Any ideas why the rendering would be this slow with a brand new empty MVC4 project? My processor is an Intel Core i5-2400 and the machine has 16GB RAM.

By the way, this is not the first time the page is loaded; I reloaded the page a few times before getting this 130ms result.

UPDATE:
I followed the advice in the answer from PSCoder (remove all but the RazorViewEngine), and it halved the rendering time:

This is really good, but I still get about 70ms or higher for the main Render action of the page; ideally I'd like to halve that or better.

Specifically, I'd like to ask:

• Does this rendering time seem overly slow or is it average for my machine?
• Is there any way I can speed it up?

Solution 1

This could help improve ASP.NET MVC related performance issue , one performance improvement that you can do is to clear all the view engines and add the one(s) that you use. say for ex:- RazorViewEngine. MVC registers 2 view engines by default Webforms and Razor view engines, so clearing and adding the ones that is used alone will improve the look up performance.

You can add this in global.asax Application_Start.

        ViewEngines.Engines.Clear();    
        ViewEngines.Engines.Add(new RazorViewEngine());      

In order to completely utilize view look up caching and thus again performance gain compile the code in release mode and make sure that your web.config file is configured with <compilation debug="false" /> for view look up caching to kick in.

Solution 2

Adding to @PSL 's answer - we only ever check for `.CSHTML files

ViewEngines.Engines.Clear();

IViewEngine razorEngine = new RazorViewEngine() { FileExtensions = new string[] { "cshtml" } };

ViewEngines.Engines.Add(razorEngine);

Also, make sure you are running in Release Mode - that is absolutely critical, as ASP/Razor/MVC 'applies some pretty aggressive caching' when in release mode

<compilation targetFramework="4.0" debug="false"> in your Web.Config file.

Sam Saffron/Stack Overflow looked into view rendering performance also:

http://samsaffron.com/archive/2011/08/16/Oh+view+where+are+thou+finding+views+in+ASPNET+MVC3+

Comments

[Jez]

This helps performance, but to add to this answer, a ball-and-chain around my site's leg was System.Web.Optimization beta 2 which was really slowing everything down, see here. After upgrading that package my site is much faster.

[PSL]

Thats really weird though, but good that you found where the issue lies and was able to resolve the performance issue... :)

[Shaiju T]

what about using asynchronous partial views or Creating Asynchronous Actions in mvc ?

[Zapnologica]

@PSL does this still apply to MVC 5 ?