Making our classic ASP website faster

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If the SQL is working fine directly then there is no reason they wouldn't be just as fast in code.  Which should lead you to the conclusion that your ASP code is the cause of the problem. (assuming its not down to hundreds of people trying to access the site at the same time.)

This is a pretty big question :)

Before I could offer any sound advice, it would be helpful to get a sense of what's "slow", Can you provide some basic examples of the types of pages that are slow? Are they pages that are accessing the database, or are they pages that have complex front end design and functionality?

Changing hots probably won't speed anything up, you're best bet is to try to optimize your code.

Awhile back I had built a site with a lot of queries that ran directly in my ASP code and some of them were veeerrrrrryyy slow. I switched them over to stored procedures and my page load time increased by 1000%! That may be avenue worth exploring.

Let's get some more details and maybe even a link to the site and go from there!

Only a couple of Admins access the site.

"Slow" here means-
The admin search for their clients by 4 filters- by Last name, Counselor, Date, and company name.

The search is only one criteria at a time.  No fancy design or flash.  Then it forms a page where it puts all the query output into a form and that pretty much it.  Also, out of all these filters, only last name output is slow.

The issue is that- all five filters use the same get query function.  Even though the query is well formed such as

select ....... from ....
where... last name= ' abc'
and firstname='ccc'

The result page display takes around 9-10 seconds to display.

Hope this helps.

the reason why I recommend the SP route is because you're now putting the processing load directly on the database server, which tend to have more power.

Looks like both solutions are good given by Cathal and Bigmonty

Just to add.....

Your actual queries could should be looked at.  There are a lot of great SQL folks here.  You may want to post your sql in either MySQL or MS SQL topic.  Just some simple things like:

sql="select * from myTable where FirstName like '%"&FirstName&"%' and LastName like '%"&LastName&"'% and something like  '%"&somethingelse&"%'

Just select the fields you actual need and create you sql dynamically so you don't have to  use "likes" where you don't need to.

If you are looping through your recordset like

do unitl rs.eof
    response.write rs("lastname")&"<br>"
rs.movenext
loop

Select all Open in new window

Throw the result into an array right away using getrows() and close your db before moving on.

If you have a big join, that is where you will want to have some other experts check you query.  There are probably some ways of working you have not thought of.

Aside from that, if you are on shared hosting, step up to vps or dedicated.  Get as much RAM as you can afford.  4 gigs is nice 8 gigs is better.  

If you can get multiple drives, consider putting your db on a SSD drive.  Just moving to a dedicated or vps hosting service where the DB is not on shared services will make a huge difference.