I have created an ASP .NET page that works flawlessly and quickly from Visual Studio. It does a very large database read from a database on our network to load a gridview inside of an update panel. It displays progress in an Ajax modalpopupextender. Of course I don't expect it to be instant what with the large db reads, but it takes on the order of seconds, not on the order of minutes.

This is all working great until I put it up on the server - it is very, VERY slow when I access it via the internet - takes several minutes to load the database information into the gridview. I'm baffled why it would not perform the exact same as it had from Visual Studio. (It is in release mode and I have taken off the debug flag)

I have since been trying things like eliminating unneeded update panels and throwing out the ajax tool. Nothing has made it any faster on production. It is not the database as far as I know, since it has been consistently fast from my computer (from visual studio) and consistently slow from the server.

I am wondering, where do I look next? Has anyone else had this problem before? Could this be caused by update panels or Ajax modalpopupextenders in different parts of the application? Why would the live behaviour differ so much from the localhost behaviour?

Both the server with the ASP .NET page and the server with the database are servers on our network. I'm using Visual Studio 2008. Thank you in advance for any insight or advice.