Classic ASP website using windows authentication takes a while to load the first time after some time of inactivity

Question

My company has a Classic ASP website, hosted in IIS 10 on Windows Server 2016, that I have been tasked with optimizing the load time for. I have done everything else to get the page running optimally, however after about 5 or 10 minutes of inactivity, the page load of any given page takes about 10-15 seconds to load (then it runs smoothly afterwards until the next 5 or 10 minutes of inactivity). I have already disabled the idle timeout and the played with the recycling properties, so I have already ruled that out. I have even played with the keep-alive timeout header value which has no affect on the behavior in question.

What I believe I have narrowed it down to is the authentication. The website uses Windows Authentication and expects a company domain account to enter the admin area of the site. And, if I access any part of the site that doesn't require authentication, this page load delay does not happen. I am thinking that maybe our company has a domain policy in place that automatically logs a user out of a session after some specific amount of time of inactivity. And so maybe the site is just re-authenticating after each automatic logout which causes the delay. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Try adding the following settings in the webconfig. It will set the session state expire after 30 minutes.

<configuration>
  <system.web>
     <sessionState timeout="30"></sessionState>
  </system.web>
</configuration>