Posted: Dec. 17, 2001

Both Microsoft and beta testers say the performance of ASP.NET exceeds the performance of ASP, but benchmarks, like the mileage estimates for automobiles offered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency—"actual mileage may vary"—are notoriously difficult to interpret.

Nonetheless, during the Professional Developers Conference in October, Microsoft supplied preliminary performance data. Customers will still have to determine how to extrapolate this benchmark data to their application requirements.

The data is based on Doculab’s Nile benchmark, which is often used to evaluate the relative performance of application servers. Implementing the Nile benchmark on ASP.NET involves about 4,000 lines of C# (pronounced "C-sharp") code that creates a mix of ad-hoc searches, generates transactions that create new customers, manages shopping carts, and processes orders. Keeping the hardware constant across the tests for the application and database servers yields the following results:

Additional tests indicate there is no substantial difference if the code were to be written in VB.NET versus C#.