ASP.NET CORE–Slow Start Up


In an effort to speed up my development process, I determined that changing the logging level, even in development made a huge difference. Keep this in mind, and let me know if you find this useful.

- December 8, 2019

Rest of the Story:

I was trying to determine why my asp.net core application as so slow during startup (F5 w/debugging). I believe I found one of the reasons. By default, a new asp.net core application has an appsettings.Development.json file.  Within this file there are several settings to set the default log level.  Typically, you will see something like the following

{ 
"Logging": 
    { 
        "LogLevel": 
        {  
            "Default": "Debug", 
            "System": "Information", 
            "Microsoft": "Information"
        } 
    }  
}  

Keep in mind the order of settings are as follows going from very verbose to turned off.

  • Trace (Very Verbose)
  • Debug
  • Information
  • Warning
  • Error
  • Critical
  • None

I found that setting my development log settings to anything above Warning improved startup up time significantly!

After I figured out above I did come across a Rick Strahl post.  If you don’t follow Rick do.