My app runs slower with the .NET agent enabled

Issue

After installing the .NET agent, my application now runs more slowly.

Cause

As you might expect, Contrast's analysis makes your application run a little slower. But, the time difference is usually minimal, and the results are definitely worth it.

It's more important to think about how Contrast affects the round-trip time. In typical applications, Contrast doubles the round-trip time for a request that contains a lot of business logic. Contrast only affects the CPU processing time of your application. Round-trip times for static resources don't get measurably worse in most cases. In many applications, a significant amount of time is spent waiting on databases and accessing remote resources. In requests where the total round-trip time is dominated by database or WebService calls, Contrast's effect is less noticeable.

Resolution

If performance is crucial to your environment, consider the following options.

• Ensure that the server meets the recommended system requirements and the server has enough free memory before the .NET agent is installed. (Ideally, applications should use less than half of the memory available when the Contrast .NET agent isn't installed.)
• Run Contrast in Sampling mode, and change sampling frequency to be less frequent.
• Change the stack trace configuration of Contrast to Limited or Minimal.
• Exclude some applications from instrumentation and analysis using Application Pool Filtering.
• Run Contrast during nightly integration tests.
• Run Contrast in an alternate environment (QA system or DEV environment).
• Run Contrast on a single node in a load balanced environment.

While the options above should provide the biggest boost to performance, you can try the following steps to tune performance further.

• Check that the agent's logging level is set to WARN or ERROR.
• Disable analysis that requires capturing the HTTP response through policy.