I've been upgrading my podcast site from a 10 year old WebMatrix site to modern open-source ASP.NET Core with Razor Pages. The site is now off the IIS web server and running cross-platform in Azure.

I added Application Insights to the site in about 10 min just a few days ago. It was super easy to setup and basically automatic in Visual Studio 2017 Community. I left the defaults, installed a bit of script on the client, and enabled the server-side profiler, and AppInsights already found a few interesting things.

It took 10 minutes to set up App Insights. It took two days (and work continues) to fix what it found. I love it. This tool has already given me a deeper insight into how my code runs and how it's behaving - and I'm just scratching the service. I'll need to do some videos and/or more blog posts to dig deeper. Truly, you need to try it.

Slow performance in other countries

I could fill this blog post with dozens of awesome screenshots of the useful charts, graphs, and filters that I got by just turning on AppInsights. But the most interesting part is that I turned it on really expecting nothing. I figured I'd get some "Google Analytics"-type behavior.

Then I got this email:

Huh. I had set up the Azure CDN at images.hanselminutes.com to handle all the faces for each episode. I then added lazy loading so that the webite only loads the images that enter the browser's viewport. I figured I was pretty much done.

However I didn't really think about the page itself as it loads for folks from around the world - given that it's hosted on Azure in the West US.

Ideally I'd want the site to load in less than a second, but this is my archives page with 600 shows so it's pretty heavy.

Yuck. I have a few options. I could pay and load up another copy of the site in South Asia and then do some global load balancing. However, I'm hosting this on a single small (along with a dozen other sites) so I don't want to really pay much to fix this.

I ended up signing up for a free account at CloudFlare and set up caching for my HTML. The images stay the same. served by the Azure CDN.

Fixing Random and regular Server 500 errors

I left the site up for a while and came back later to a warning. You can see my site availability is just 93%. Note that there's "2 Servers?" That's because one is my local machine! Very cool that AppInsights also (optionally) tracks your local development server as well.

When I dig in I see a VERY interesting sawtooth pattern.

Pro Tip - Recognizing that a Sawtooth Pattern is a Bad Thing (tm) is an important DevOps thing. Why is this happening regularly? Is it exactly regularly (like every 4 hours on a schedule?) or somewhat regularly (like a garbage collection issue?)

What do these operations have in common? Look closely.

It's not a GET it's a HEAD. Remember that HTTP Verbs are more than GET, POST, PUT, DELETE. There's also HEAD. It literally is a HEADer call. Like a GET, but no body.

HTTP HEAD - The HEAD method is identical to GET except that the server MUST NOT return a message-body in the response.

I installed HTTPie - which is like curl or wget for humans - and issue a HEAD command from my local machine while under the debugger.

Ok that is bad. See the 500? I check out AppInsights and see it has the full call stack. See it's getting a NullReferenceException as it tries to Render() the Razor page?

It turns out since I'm using Razor Pages, I have implemented "OnGet" where I do my data base work then pass a model to the pages to generate HTML. However, if someone issues a HEAD, then the pages still run but the local data work never happened (I have no OnHead() call). I have a few options here. I could handle HEAD myself. I could no-op it, but that'd be a lie.

THOUGHT: I think this behavior is sub-optimal. While GET and POST are distinct and it makes sense to require an OnGet() and OnPost(), I think that HEAD is special. It's basically a GET with a "don't return the body" flag set. So why not have Razor Pages automatically delegate OnHead to OnGet, unless there's an explicit OnHead() declared? I'll file an issue on GitHub because I don't like this behavior and I find it counter-intuitive. I could also register a global IPageFilter to make this work for all my site's pages.

The simplest thing to do is just to delegate the OnHead to to the OnGet handler.

Then double check and test it with HTTPie:

C:\>http --verify=no HEAD https://localhost:5001

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2018 03:53:55 GMT

Request-Context: appId=cid-v1:e310025f-88e9-4133-bc15-e775513c67ac

Server: Kestrel

Bonus - Application Map

Since I have AppInsights enabled on both the client and the server, I can see this cool live Application Map. I'll check again in a few days to see if I have fewer errors. You can see where my Podcast Site calls into the backend data service at Simplecast.

I saw a few failures in my call to SimpleCast's API as I was failing to consistently set my API key. Everything in this map can be drilled down into.

Bonus - Web Performance Testing

I figured while I was in the Azure Portal I would also take advantage of the free performance testing. I did a simulated aggressive 250 users beating on the site. Average response time is 1.22 seconds and I was doing over 600 req/second.

I am learning a ton of stuff. I have more things to fix, more improvements to make, and more insights to dig into. I LOVE that it's creating all this work for me because it's giving me a better application/website!

You can get a free Azure account at http://azure.com/free or check out Azure for Startups https://azure.microsoft.com/overview/startups/ and get a bunch of free Azure time. AppInsights works with Node, Docker, Java, ASP.NET, ASP.NET Core, and other platforms. It even supports telemetry in Electron or Windows Apps.

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