I've assigned a project where the performance is very unsual and really slow
at times. At my first glance at the deployment I found that the project was
deployed in "Debug" mode with the compilation node's debug attribute and
trace attributes set to "true". I compiled in "Release" mode and set the
debug and trace attributes to false and saw a quick improvement in
performance. But not pretty much though.

Here is the architecture of the application.

1. The application is deployed into a webfarm environment. From dev system,
it will be moved to staging - QA/UAT and then to Production. We've no control
of the IIS and the webfarm since its maintained by some other group.
2. The application is heavily dependant on interoperable SOAP calls. The
SOAP Servers are all in Java and many soap calls were made for each request
from the asp.net front-end. I know this is the potential issue for
performance. But I tried implementing logs and found that all soap calls were
just around 1 second to return data.
3. And the developer has used complex, composite and a large number of
User-Controls which all do Data-Binding for the data that is dynamic.
4. All the data retrieval from Soap calls are online (OLTP) data and it has
to be live.
5. The application also makes calls to Sybase occasionaly to various
providers but those calls were negliable compared to the SOAP calls.

The application would be really fast at time and unbelievably slow at other
time. Why does this happen? Is it solely because of SOAP calls? Or the data
binding of large set of controls for dynamic data? Or the use of
User-Controls for data binding repeaters?

Any insight into this appreciated.

Thanks,
Elango.