title: IIS 6.0 wildcard mapping benchmarks?
body: <p>I'm quickly falling in love with ASP.NET MVC beta, and one of the things I've decided I won't sacrifice in deploying to my IIS 6 hosting environment is the extensionless URL. Therefore, I'm weighing the consideration of adding a wildcard mapping, but everything I read suggests a potential performance hit when using this method. However, I can't find any actual benchmarks! </p>
  
  <p>The first part of this question is, do you know where I might find such benchmarks, or is it just an untested assumption?</p>
  
  <p>The second part of the question is in regards to the 2 load tests I ran using jMeter on our dev server over a 100Mbs connection. </p>
  
  <p><strong>Background Info</strong></p>
  
  <p>Our hosting provider has a 4Gbs burstable internet pipe with a 1Gbs backbone for our VLAN, so anything I can produce over the office lan should translate well to the hosting environment. </p>
  
  <p>The test scenario was to load several images / css files, since the supposed performance hit comes when requesting files that are now being passed through the ASP.NET ISAPI filter that would not normally pass through it. Each test contained 50 threads (simulated users) running the request script for 1000 iterations each. The results for each test are posted below.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Test Results</strong></p>
  
  <p>Without wildcard mapping:</p>
  
  <pre>
  Samples: 50,000
  Average response time: 428ms
  Number of errors: 0
  Requests per second: 110.1
  Kilobytes per second: 11,543
  </pre>
  
  <p>With wildcard mapping:</p>
  
  <pre>
  Samples: 50,000
  Average response time: 429ms
  Number of errors: 0
  Requests per second: 109.9
  Kilobytes per second: 11,534
  </pre>
  
  <p>Both tests were run warm (everything was in memory, no initial load bias), and from my perspective, performance was about even. CPU usage was approximately 60% for the duration of both tests, memory was fine, and network utilization held steady around 90-95%.</p>
  
  <p>Is this sufficient proof that wildcard mappings that pass through the ASP.NET filter for ALL content don't <em>really</em> affect performance, or am I missing something?</p>
  
  <p>Edit: 11 hours and not a single comment? I was hoping for more.. lol</p>