Hi,

See this article that explains why it is slow on first startup, especially the part at the bottom about some free services that can ping your site often enough to keep it awake.

Hope that helps,

Joe

AppKeepAlive task cannot work in some medium trust hosting environments, they may not allow server side web requests so yes it could be disabled.

But I recommend don't use AppKeepAlive even if it does work, use a free external service as linked in the article. The remote service can make periodic web requests to your site and this will keep it alive better and more reliably than the AppKeepAlive.

Hi,

csshandler.ashx can be expensive on the first hit because it is combining a bunch of css files and then minifying the combined css. It gets cached on the server and in the browser so subsequent requests should be fast.

I would also review the mojoportal log under Administration > System Log

If you see the application start and end events logged repeatedly in short times it means the application pool is being recycled frequently. This can happen in a low memory hosting environment if the host forces the app pool to recycle when it reaches a certain memory limit. If the app is continually restarting it is usually an indicator that that is happening and this will kill performance.

For the css handler problem there is a way that you could remove it from the load equation. Copy the rendered minified css  output from csshandler.ashx into a new file named style-combined.css and put it in your skin folder.

Then in the style.config file in the skin folder comment out all the files that are there and add one entry for the new combined file.

Then add this in user.config:

<add key="CombineCSS" value="false"/>

recycle the app or touch web.config to reload the above setting.

Now if you view the source it should link directly to the style-combined.css file instead of to csshandler.ashx

​That will reduce the memory usage a little as well so it may help with other problems.

​Hope that helps,

Joe