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Comment by lunixbochs | Hacker News Reader

I'm not familiar with C# compile at runtime. Are you saying your change was to do an AOT compile locally?

That's an old ASP.NET Web Forms / ASPX thing that was IIS-based. IIS would just compile .cs files into a temporary folder when first running. So the first request takes like 5s or something.

It's not the new .NET Core AOT feature, GP was building the DLLs and packaging the website locally.

Not GP but funny enough I ran into a similar problem with a team that also didn't know compilation and was just copy/pasting into a server.

>> So the first request takes like 5s or something.

I haven't worked with IIS in more than five years, but couldn't you change some setting to infinity so the thread never sleeps... or something like that? I remember the "5 second" thing being a problem with commercial IIS apps we deployed, and that's always how we avoided it.

This feature dated back to the .NET 1.1 days and was a " web site" project vs a "web app" project. It operated much like PBP, in the sense you could ftp raw code and it just worked, but it could also just blow up in your face because the whole site was never compiled in one go.

This "pause" would only happen for the first request after uploading fresh source code. This is not like Heroku or AWS Lambda. The compilation results were stored in a temporary folder, so you could restart the server and you wouldn't see the issue.

The solution was just to compile the app before deploying, as grandparent did.

Even back then the general consensus was that "not compiling" was a bad idea.

When dotnet first came out, Microsoft tried to bridge the old to the new. They included the IIS compile time capability to mimic jsp (Java server pages) and asp (Active server pages) so programmers could more easily make the leap.

Most serious developers skipped this goofiness and deployed compiled and tested builds.

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