Question

I use a REST-Services which needs Bacis-Authentication on the following way:

private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) {
    try {
        var url = "http://172.34.1.111:8088/ustrich/rest/projects/pid/1234";
        using (var wc = this.CreateWebClient(url)) {
            var stopWatch = new Stopwatch();
            stopWatch.Start();
            var s = wc.DownloadString(url);
            stopWatch.Stop();
            this.label1.Text = stopWatch.Elapsed.ToString();
            this.textBox1.Text = s;
        }
    } catch (Exception ex) {
        this.textBox1.Text = ex.ToString();
    }
}

protected WebClient CreateWebClient(string url) {
    var webClient = new WebClient();
    var cache = new CredentialCache { { new Uri(url), "Basic", new NetworkCredential("rest", "rest") } };
    webClient.Credentials = cache;
    webClient.Headers.Add("Content-Type", "text/xml; charset=utf-8");
    webClient.Encoding = Encoding.UTF8;
    return webClient;
}

The problem is now, when I start my Test-Application and execute this code, the first time it takes about 5 seconds on wc.DownloadString(url). The follow calls, when I click the second etc. time on the button, it takes only 300ms.
Now my question: Is there something wrong in my code? Can I optimize something there to resolve the problem that it takes 5 seconds on first call?
Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

The first time you hit the code, it gets precompiled. It will always be slow this time. I believe you can use MSBUILD to do this when you build your code but that’s just transferring the time to a different part of the process. In production, this will only happen each time the worker process restarts.