Well, there are ways to test this. You can use the
HttpWebRequest/HttpWebResponse classes to see how fast the content is
delivered to you from your site when requesting the URL (how fast it renders
is a separate issue which is very browser specific).
Beyond that though, I would venture to guess that decreasing the size of
the code-behind dll isn't going to improve performance much, unless you are
talking about removing all irrelevant whitespace from the HTML parts of the
ASPX pages (that would help with transmission time, and parsing time, to a
degree). How much though might approach the "diminishing returns" area
though, depending on the page, of course.
I would also say that referenced dlls are not going to impact
performance really, as that is a one-time event (the loading of the dll) and
once completed, doesn't really impact further operations. Now, I suppose if
you referenced so many dlls that you are placing an exorbitant amount of
memory pressure on the OS, you could have a problem, but I don't recall ever
hearing about an instance like that.
So, bottom line? Decreasing the page size (removing irrelevant
whitespace) from a page will increase performance, reducing referenced dlls,
not really.
