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I picked up this gem of a book when it first came out in eBook format during the PDC. I sent it over to my Kindle and got through the entire book during session downtimes. I planned on being the first to post a review of this book on Amazon but I’ve sat it out too long and will now be the fifth review.

The first four reviewers did a pretty respectable job of providing and overview of Mr. Kiessig’s qualifications and the book content and have all awarded the book the entirely deserved 5 start rating. Rather than pile on more information about Rick Kiessig or what’s in the book, I’m going to tell you why, as a person who has spent a good amount of time looking at .NET application performance, I recommend this book to every person I work with as mandatory reading:

* Although there are great rules out there for web site optimization and corresponding tools to test these rules (e.g. Yahoo’s Yslow), it’s great to see the client side examples from an ASP.NET specific point of view.

* It’s interesting to see someone who bucks the current trends and provides some real insight on when it’s appropriate to use ORM’s, saying essentially that objects are good but ORM’s might not be the best engine if you’re building a Formula 1 race car.

* Try finding another book that will even touch web gardens, partitioning an application into different AppPools, or using the /3GB switch. Try finding a Microsoft engineer who will talk to you about those items and offer objective guidance.

* The write-up and source code on asynchronous web pages and background worker threads – worth the price of the book alone.

* Creative, out-of-the-box ideas: using SQL Server Express for caching, using BI services to support the web tier of the application, etc. – not the kind of advice you find in your typical MSDN article.

It would be interesting to see how ASP.NET MVC and Silverlight play out performance-wise but alas, these technologies are a bit newer and Mr. Kiessig had to get a book to press. I’d gladly pay for the second edition of this book if it includes a couple of additional chapters that address these technologies. Until then, this is by far the most thorough and pragmatic book on ASP.NET performance to be had on the market. It might be simply an eye-opening read or the book that saves your skin one day. Either way, you won’t regret picking this book up.
Rating: 5 / 5

This book is simply brilliant, and checking the credentials of the author, a distinguished veteran engineering manager and software architect, one is not suprised in the least. It is one of those special books that pop up now and then – of the kind that would be written by .NET experts such as Juval Lowy or Jeffery Ritcher and a combination of an architectural guru such as Chris Loosley who wrote the now dated but probably best distributed software performance/scalability text ever written High-Performance Client/Server or say Martin Fowler who wrote one of the two quintessential patterns-based software architecture texts, Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture.

The MS Press Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability (Patterns & Practices) is similar in spirit and content to Ultra-Fast ASP.NET, but though still useful, it is quite dated (published 2004, that is before .NET 2.0/ASP.NET 2.0) and also much broader in scope and a bigger tome. In contrast, Ultra Fast targets ASP.NET and is very up-to-date, very readable and practical. By limiting the scope to ASP.NET and MS platforms he was able to comfortably and expertly cover all tiers, from the web front-end through the web/app tier to the data and infrastructure layers. Similar books exist for the LAMP platform (e.g, Building Scalable Web Sites: Building, Scaling, and Optimizing the Next Generation of Web Applications and High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers) but this is the only up-to-date such book for ASP.NET and I highly recommend it, as other reviewers have rightly said, for not just the advanced but beginner and intermediate ASP.NET developers, architects and development project managers. I would however, suggest that one gets this book along with what appears to be the quintessential, modern software architecture text – due to its sheer quality and applicability combined with concise coverage of just about all dimensions and viewpoints of contemporary real life software architecture, Software Systems Architecture: Working With Stakeholders Using Viewpoints and Perspectives. Splendid stuff!

I think I may not be alone in believing that a similar text is much needed that would cover the Win-forms/Desktop client application space mirroring the current text. Such a text would delve into the performance scaling considerations of Threading/New Parallel features for multi-processors; WCF/Asmx Web Services, REST/SOAP, ADO.NET/EF/LINQ-PLINQ/other ORMs such as NHibernate, etc. and be structured similarly to Mr. Kiessig’s current text. Hope Mr. Kiessig will accept the honor!
Rating: 5 / 5

One of the author’s stated goals for this book is “to help remove some of the fog that may be masking the end-to-end vision of the technology and to help you see the beauty and the full potential of ASP.NET and SQL Server.” He does an excellent job of doing just that.

We all want our web applications to run lean, clean and fast, but how do we best spend our time doing so? You might ask, “Should I spend more time improving my caching strategies? How should I approach it?” or “Should I spend my time trying to optimize IIS’s performance? Where do I begin with that?”

With so many different ways to approach any given problem, you could spend days or weeks learning all the different ways you MIGHT be able to get your desired results. But if you’re like me, after a while you just say, “OK, OK, someone please just tell me the best way to approach this for most situations and I’ll tweak it for my needs.” That’s what you get here.

This book is great. It is a collection of best practices, tips and tricks for architecting your web applications to be both ultra-fast AND ultra-scalable. Instead of listing a thousand things you might want to try out to see if it helps, this book just says, “here is a proven approach that works for most situations, most of the time”. Thank you! Let’s implement it and move on to the next one.

But more than just telling you, “Do this, then do that”, this book explains the Why’s as you go along. This is invaluable as it is how we actually learn and integrate these things into our understanding of the big picture.

It is clear that the author has deep and intimate knowledge of the subject. His credentials explain why. He began working with the Internet and writing network-oriented software in the 70′s. More recently, he was an architect at the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) in Silicon Valley where he ran two- to three-day architectural design sessions once or twice each week for some of Microsoft’s largest and most sophisticated customers. In understanding their issues and helping them architect solutions he saw many of the same questions coming up time and time again. Questions such as:

* “How can we make our HTML display faster?” (Chapter 2)

* “What’s the best way to do caching?” (Chapter 3)

* “How can we use IIS to make our site faster?” (Chapter 4)

* “How should we handle session state?” (Chapter 5)

* “How can we improve our ASP.NET code?” (Chapters 5 to 7)

* “Why is our database slow?” (Chapters 8 and 9)

* “How can we optimize our infrastructure and operations?” (Chapter 10)

* “Where do we start?” (Chapter 11)

I’m thrilled someone has finally written a book like this. It really helps a developer learn and understand the end-to-end big picture… not only the How’s but, more importantly, the Why’s.

Kudos Mr. Kiessig.

Rating: 5 / 5