This is the first installment of what will hopefully be many Umbraco benchmark reports created by various members of the core team in the lead up to the launch of Umbraco 4.1. This benchmark report is about the request/response performance of the Umbraco back-office. This compares 4 different configurations: 4.0.3 with browser cache disabled (first run), 4.0.3 with browser cached files, 4.1 with browser cache disabled and 4.1 with browser cached files. These comparisons have been done by using newly installed Umbraco instances with ONLY the CWS package installed. The benchmark results were prepared by using Charles Proxy.

Test	Stats	4.0.3	4.0.3 client cached	4.1	4.1 client cached
Content app	Completed Requests	68	7	46	6
	Response (KB)	687.05	72.48	431.41	32.54
Edit content home page	Completed Requests	50	2	34	1
	Response (KB)	385.10	47.28	343.36	12.07
Expand all content nodes	Completed Requests	17	17	16	16
	Response (KB)	18.47	18.47	13.96	10.85
TOTALS	Completed Requests	135	26	96	23
	Response (KB)	1063.62	138.23	788.73	55.46

Note: the above is based on <compilation debug=”false”> being set in the web.config. If it is set to true, the compression, combination and minification for both the ClientDependency framework and ScriptManager is not enabled. Also, this is not based on having IIS 7’s dynamic/static compression turned on, these benchmarks are based on Umbraco performing ‘as is ‘ out of the box which will be the same for IIS 6.

Though there’s only 3 tests listed above, these results will be consistent throughout all applications in the Umbraco back office in version 4.1.

The 4.1 difference:

• In 4.0.3, all ScriptResource calls generated by ScriptManager were not being compressed or minified. This was due to a browser compatibility flag that was set in the base page (this was probably very old code from pre v3!).
• Script managers in the back-office have the ScriptMode=”release” explicitly set (for minification of ScriptResource.axd)
• The ClientDependency framework is shipped with 4.1 and all of the back office registers it’s JavaScript and CSS files with this framework. This allows for:
  • Combination, compression, minification of dependencies
  • Rogue script/style detection (for those scripts/styles that weren’t registered with the framework will still get compressed/minified)
  • Compression/minification of specified Mime types, in this case all JSON requests in the back office (namely the tree)
  • Compression/minification of all JavaScript web service proxy classes (‘asmx/js’ requests that are made by registering web services with the ScriptManager
• Much of the back office client scripting in 4.1 has been completely refactored. Most of the JavaScript has been rewritten and a ton of file cleanup has been done.

Compared to 4.0.3, this is a HUGE difference with some serious performance benefits!