If you ever encountered a slow initial web application loan (for the first user accessing the web application), if you are a asp.net developer you probably have, you may want to take a look at ScottGu’s blog post. One of the new ASP.NET 4 features is the ability to automatically startup and proactively initialize a web application without having to wait for an external client to hit the web server.

In my opinion the down side of this feature is that it is not a .Net 4 only feature but you need to use it in combination with IIS 7.5 (which ships with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2). So basically you can’t install / use this feature on older web servers :( …

There are many settings that you can use to tweak this feature such as “startMode” (AppPool), “serviceAutoStartProvider” etc. which are explained here.