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Recently I came across a nice tip on how to improve performance for the default page that is server for your website by IIS at this blog.

It is interesting as to how something this fundamental sometimes does not cross our mind but can affect performance to a great extent.

In short the tip says that IIS has some pages registered as default pages (e.g. default.asp, default.aspx, index.aspx, index.htm) and the order in which they are registered makes a huge difference.

If default page for your site is index.aspx then you should make sure that you have index.aspx listed at the front in the list of start pages. This is because IIS starts looking for default page by looking up files one by one fro the list of registered startup files and so if index.aspx is listed in the 4th position, it will try three other files before it gets to your startup page (which is a huge performance loss).

Also, IIS keeps the first default document into the HTTP.SYS kernel-mode cache. It remains there till IIS invalidates the cache. This can be a great performance gain for the file which is first in that list.

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