I hadn't heard about pageblaster - gotta check it out
But - call me stupid - but IMO one of the worse things about slow start up time is not that it is slow to get everything up in the user's face - but that the user see's nothing for like 3-10 even 20 seconds sometimes - depending on ISP etc
To address this - I'm thinking DNN should have a feature to push out a page really fast BEFORE it does any other work. Sorta like a pre-splash page that takes like no resources to fire out there.
The user sees something instantaniously. That first second is golden. Like many of you, if I hit a site for the first time and I see nothing for 3 seconds I move on.
At all costs an initial page must be blasted to the user.
What I am working on right now is an html module that will query whether the app is running, if it is not it will fire back a page to the user letting them know that things are being worked on and that I'll be right with them... meanwhile a thread has been fired that is loading up the application using the keepalive.aspx.
The page the user sees refreshes in 3...2...1 seconds and by that time things are cookin' and the user gets a reasonable page response.
I also use master.com etc to ping my sites every 15 min but in the long run that will be a loser since if everyone is doing that the hosted box will start to recycle all the time.
I'm also experimenting with the
node in the section of web.config to see if I can see some boost there.