On Friday we launched our new free eBook, 25 Secrets for Faster ASP.NET Applications!

Heading for 1000 of you have picked it up already, but if you haven’t got your copy yet, you can grab it from http://www.red-gate.com/25secrets.

It’s the follow up to the wildly successful 50 Ways to Avoid, Find and Fix ASP.NET Performance Issues, which we released back in January this year (you can download from www.red-gate.com/50ways).

Once again, we collected tips from some of the smartest brains in the ASP.NET community, but this time around, we’ve covered the latest stuff in the .NET framework – async/await, Web API, and more.

Houston, we have a winner…

In my original blogpost, I offered a Microsoft Surface as a prize for the best tip. Now, after some serious deliberation, our judges have settled on a winner. By a unanimous verdict, the prize goes to…

(wait for it!)

…

Jeffrey Richter, for this cheeky number, Tip #1 in the new book:

Want to build scalable websites and services? Work asynchronously

One of the secrets to producing scalable websites and services is to perform all your I/O operations asynchronously to avoid blocking threads.

When your thread issues a synchronous I/O request, the Windows kernel blocks the thread. This causes the thread pool to create a new thread, which allocates a lot of memory and wastes precious CPU time. Calling xxxAsync method and using C#’s async/await keywords allows your thread to return to the thread pool so it can be used for other things. This reduces the resource consumption of your app, allowing it to use more memory and improving response time to your clients.

Congratulations Jeffrey!

Of course, I also owe a massive thank you to everyone who’s been involved in the book, especially all the authors. It’s a real treat to work with a developer community that’s so keen to collaborate and to share their hard-won nuggets of performance knowhow. If you haven’t read it yet, I can’t recommend it highly enough. You can get it for free at www.red-gate.com/25secrets

The full backstory for both eBooks:

• https://www.simple-talk.com/blogs/2012/11/15/application-performance-the-best-of-the-web/
• https://www.simple-talk.com/blogs/2012/11/27/application-performance-episode-2-announcing-the-judges/
• https://www.simple-talk.com/blogs/2013/01/25/free-ebook-50-ways-to-avoid-find-and-fix-asp-net-performance-issues/
• https://www.simple-talk.com/blogs/2013/03/22/50-ways-to-avoid-find-and-fix-asp-net-performance-issues-the-next-generation/