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We have the same ASP.NET application running on a couple of servers:

  1. one instance runs under IIS 8.5 on Windows Server *2012* R2
  2. two instances run under IIS 7.5 on Windows Server *2008* R2

What bugs me is that the newer machine seems to perform worse than both of the older machines!

CPU vs. Requests/sec - 2012 with IIS 8.5

On the 2012 box, a window of about 80 minutes shows an average 37% CPU usage (Processor time), and 8 Requests/sec on average.

On the 2008 box, in the same time frame, I see 32.5% CPU usage and 12.5 Requests/sec:

CPU vs. Requests/sec - 2008 with IIS 7.5

What's more, the CPU on the 2012 box (Intel Core i7-4770 @ 3.40GHz) is actually supposed to be faster than the one on the 2008 boxes (Intel Xeon E3-1230 @ 3.20GHz):

CPU performance comparison

Adding to my lack of comprehension of this performance difference is the fact, that the 2012 instance only runs the one ASP.NET application, whereas both of the 2008 servers fulfill other tasks as well: one runs the DB server that is accessed by all three application instances, the other runs quite a few other ASP.NET applications under the same IIS instance.

QUESTION:

Can anyone shed some light on what could be the culprit of the better equipped server falling so far behind in terms of ASP.NET application performance?

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  • You need to perfmon more counters than just the processor usage. There are several issues that could manifest as higher CPU time but the processor is not the problem. Also, what is the power plan set to?
    – Greg Askew
    Apr 22, 2015 at 14:27
  • @GregAskew: Please add an answer with your hint to check the Power Plan - it was set to Balanced! After setting it to High Performance the PerfMon graph changed its look entirely :-)
    – Oliver
    Apr 22, 2015 at 20:29

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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I believe this has been covered in several places, but the Balanced power plan can cause excessive transitions between performance states. This results in exceptionally poor performance, and affects both physicals and virtuals.

Change the power plan to High Performance to use the hardware to its limits.

Slow Performance on Windows Server 2008 R2 when using the “Balanced” Power Plan:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2207548

https://sqlserverperformance.wordpress.com/2010/09/28/windows-power-plans-and-cpu-performance/

http://www.brentozar.com/archive/2010/10/sql-server-on-powersaving-cpus-not-so-fast/

EDIT by @oliver:

Switching to the High Performance power plan resulted in these PerfMon stats: enter image description here

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