I'm trying to diagnose the cause of poor performance from a third-party web application we've deployed; the environment is:
- ASP.NET on IIS, Windows 2003 Server
- SQL Server 2008 on a separate Windows 2003 Server
There is one particular area of the application which is incredibly slow (4-5 seconds per request); the application vendor has commented that the performance seems quite slow for the hardware we are running it on, and suggested that our configuration is at fault (but not offered any advice otherwise).
How can I go about working out where the problem is (SQL config, IIS config, the application itself, hardware)? Performance monitor seems to have hundreds of options and no easy way to work out where I should be looking; I've run some SQL traces without seeing any immediate errors, and a series of Wireshark captures have revealed that there are 5 moderately large SQL query sequences between the HTTP request and response.
Is there anything special I should be doing with the MSSQL/IIS configuration? The ASP.NET application is currently masquerading as a domain user to allow a scheduled task to write to a network share; apart from that, I'm not sure what changes have been made to the default configurations, but I do have a test server running IIS and SQL Express to experiment with.
