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First to answer your question, the keepalive solutions prevent .Net from timing out and cleaning up its memory structures after long periods of inactivity. Therefore, if you go to the site and the first page comes up in a second or two that means that ASP.Net did not need to restart the application and do all that extra disk I/O activity. This may be because either the keepalive solution is working or someone else visited the site within the last 15 minutes or so. That is the first sign that your keepalive solution is working, but also, if you go to the site very late at night when the possibility of other people having touched the site is less, and the site comes up quickly, then your keepalive solution is probably working. You can also look at your IIS logs, notice I said IIS logs, not DNN logs, I believe that the hits to the keepalive.aspx file are not logged.
I think I read in one of your posts that the outbound speed for your site is something like 270KB, if that is the case, that is kind of slow. You need to minimize your use of pictures and optimize them as much as possible. From your line speed numbers looks like you have a cable modem connection, is that correct? If that is the case, your actual speeds will fluctuate with traffic congestion as the cable modem line is shared with all your neighbors and the performance is affected when the network is congested. Is the site slower in the evening when everybody gets home???
By the way, when I went to your site just now it came up very fast. I also noticed that you are doing HTTP compression, that is a good thing. See the following site for some stats: http://www.port80software.com/tools/testyoursite.asp?url=www.northstarcamaroclub.net.
One more thing, what is the configuration of your server? How much memory does it have? How about the database, are you using SQL Express or Standard? If you have not adjusted the settings SQL Server Express can close the database file and incur a little bit of overhead to open it every time it needs access.
Also, your top banner is kind of heavy at 134,316 bytes...
Carlos