Just my 2 cents worth. Yes, I also find that the first time I open the application it is slow. I use Visual Studio & ASP.net. so your experience may vary, but I'm sure the principles are the same. Running in debug mode from VS always compiles the site in IIS Express before you start. If you aren't debugging from VS or similar IDE, IIS creates and caches each page the first time someone opens it and then keeps it cached untill the app pool is stopped, the memory cap is reached or the recycle time is reached (You set these in IIS on the app pool properties) To decrease this load time, you can ensure that your web config inludes a debug="false" which removes some overhead and makes pages load faster. What makes much more of an impact is if you can publish the website precompiled. You can then set your tested app to run off localhost directly. This means IIS doesn't wait till you want to load the page to compile the website the first time. It won't eliminate that first cache though. You can map your pages in namemapping as http://*/Pages/MyPage so you don't end up having to remap everything each time you switch from testing to production servers
