Solving Sharepoint’s long startup time

When developing on a Sharepoint server, I have to iisreset or recycle the application pool countless times, and that is always paired with some seemlessly endless startup time (usually around 2 Minutes until Sharepoint starts serving pages again).

It turns out that this is not just something that is given, but there is a reason and even a solution to it, as Jeroen Ritmeijer points out in his blog posting:

The problem is that when loading signed assemblies the .net Framework checks the Internet based certificate revocation list. As our servers have, like most secure environments, no outgoing connections to the public Internet the connection to crl.microsoft.com times out after what appears to be 30 seconds. It probably does this a couple of times in succession, causing a 2 minute wait when spinning up SharePoint.

Jeroen also reports some workarounds for this. I have to say, this is one of the most important tips as it really speeds up development! Or, to say it with his words: "life is good again..... well as good as it gets when you are doing SharePoint development.".