We have an ASP.Net Webforms site (.Net 3.5) that has about 100 references in the project, so it's not tiny. Reuilding the site takes maybe 20-30 seconds but it's the load time that's a killer. At least 5 minutes before the first page opens in the browser on our development machines. We're building in VS 2012 fwiw.
What can we do to speed things up? There's an 'optimizeCompilation' flag you can put into web.config, and that's helped a little but not as much as we'd hoped. Is there a checklist we can go through to try and find the real bottlenecks in the site load time?
I can state that when the site is coming up the ASP.Net Temporary files folder slowly accumulates files. When all is said and done there are about 2500 files in there, ~70MB total size. It almost feels like we can hand-write the contents of that folder using Notepad faster than ASP.Net puts them in there.