I have a Web application (http://www.holidaystreets.com), it has around 120,000+ pages. Whenever we restart the server it takes more then 15 minutes for the site to warm up.
I built it as ‘Release’, do not have any heavy stuff initilizing (i.e. Control Adapters or in APPInit).
Any tips?
Mystery Solved
Well I spoted the problem today. This application was converted from WebSite type project to WebApplication type. I had codedom defined in web.config so that I can compile each page separately when requested first time. (this was done becuase we had such a huge number of pages). However in WebApplication it was compiling each and every page on first load. Since removing the section, the application is loading in less then 2 seconds!
Probably you have lots of static data that a initiated on the first hit. Look for big amount of cached data, that you use in static classes (probably getting it from the db?).