While scanning the ASP.NET DotNetNuke Forum tonight I noticed someone asking about DNN initial loading performance being slow, which is something I have definitely noticed having used DNN for over a month now. That first load can be SLOOOOOOW, and is something I will continue to investigate in the future. I know there are a number of things I can do to decrease load time.
One thing I had planned was writing a Winforms or console app which would load the dbvt.com, /ngallery and /blog home pages every 10 or 15 minutes to keep the DLLs from being flushed from the host's server memory. I was confident someone already had written this app, but didn't know it was so readily available as a free service from Master.com. I signed up for the free WatchDog service which does exactly what I want, that is, hit dbvt.com, dbvt.com/ngallery, and dbvt.com/blog every 15 minutes and let me know if they're down, along with providing a sweet little report of initial load stats over time.
But what I'm so pleased about is that now my dnn, ngallery, and .text dbvt.com applications should load more quickly.