Long time in Render phase on production server

[Tony]

I have a very peculiar problem that I am hoping someone can point me in
the right direction on. I have an asp.net page that displays a virtual
paycheck to a user. One asp.net page calls another that has its return
type as a jpeg. This jpeg is an image of a paycheck that is written on
top of with the appropriate information. The code runs fine on all of
our development machines as well as our test server. But on our live
server it takes a few seconds longer to run. When I turned trace on, I
found some bizarre results.

Here is what I see when I run it on my computer...

aspx.page Begin Render 0.102000 0.000062
aspx.page End Render 0.133487 0.031487

Obviously very fast... but in production.. I see this...

aspx.page Begin Render 0.061270 0.000019
aspx.page End Render 4.517474 4.456204

4.5 seconds in rendering!

And just as strange, it takes forever for the trace content to show up.
First the top part shows, then another table, then another table, and
it is about a minute before all the trace tables show up. This
behavior has been verified on multiple PCs. Our product server is dual
Xeon, much beefier than our development machines. I am unable to find
any problem like this on google, and I really have no idea whatsoever
on the root of this problem. Any ideas are welcome!

Thank you.

Tony

 

[Scott Allen]

Tony:

Could there be a concurrency issue? Have you tried any stress testing
on the jpeg producing code?

 

[Tony]

I have not done any stress testing. However this page is not hit by a
large amount of users. I can't think of any concurrency issue that
would slow that page down in that way. I could hit it at 3 am when
nothing is happening and it would still be slow in this manner.