title: Why is the ASP.NET/Visual Studio Web Development Server so slow?
body: <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/c0wxX.png" alt="Compiling - XKCD">(<a href="http://xkcd.com/303/" rel="nofollow noreferrer" title="Image source">xkcd</a>)</p>
  
  <p>I know that compiling nowadays is much faster than it was before. Yet, for me, it seems that compiling and especially <strong>running/debugging ASP.NET projects with the Visual Studio Web Development Server is incredibly slow</strong>.</p>
  
  <p>Since the beginning of last summer, I've been working heavily on ASP.NET MVC projects. Of course, the best way to debug them is by using the web server that comes with Visual Studio. When doing that, I get horrendously slow loading times. Chrome dev tools typically report that loading one of my pages had a <strong>3 <em>minute</em> wait time</strong>, followed by a short loading time.</p>
  
  <p>I've seen <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24959/debugging-asp-net-with-firefox-and-visual-studio-net-very-slow-compared-to-ie">these</a> <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4260399/debugging-asp-net-with-chrome-and-visual-studio-net-very-slow-compared-to-ie">two</a> questions, but they don't help. While I do most of my debugging work in Chrome, the same happens in IE.</p>
  
  <p>Has anyone else had this problem before? If so, any tips?</p>
  
  <p>Also, I doubt that the problem lies with the speed of my machine. This computer is really fast running Windows 7 and Visual Studio 2010, so I don't see why ASP.NET debugging should be so slow.</p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p><strong>UPDATE:</strong> In his answer below, Jon Skeet suggested attempting to identify whether the problem is being caused by the environment or by the code itself. I created a brand new MVC project and ran it. The first test appeared to be much faster. However, after testing it a few more times, it's safe to say that the first test was an anomaly - usually, it takes as long as my big project (2 - 3 minutes). Thus, <strong>this is a problem with the environment</strong>. Thanks in advance for any help!</p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p><strong>UPDATE #2:</strong> It's been a while since I updated this question. Here are some details I've gathered since my last update:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>This delay is occuring on both of my development machines, both running Windows 7 and Visual Studio 2010</li>
  <li>This delay is happening for all my MVC2 and MVC3 projects (but I haven't experimented with plain ASP.NET yet)</li>
  <li>Plain/vanilla MVC projects experience the same delay as MVC projects with big codebases</li>
  <li>Disabling IntelliTrace did not help</li>
  <li>Disabling IPv6 did not help</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>I haven't found a solution for this problem, so I've been stuck with huge wait times. Does anyone know how to solve this?</p>