Appreciate your need to rant, since we've all been there and it's probably quite cathartic. Ideally you wouldn't need to have cycles of starting web pages to test your serverside code, it should be covered by a suite of unit tests that can be run without starting up the entire application. Secondly I confirm what someone else mentioned here about trying more recent versions of ASP.Net / ASP.NET Core since it's designed to compete on performance with open source equivalents - part of this is creating a level playing field by allowing you turn off all the features that you don't want, allowing for a like for like comparison. We sometimes don't realise how many things you get for free with ASP.Net / IIS... so if you don't want those features, turn them off... and make sure you apply effective testing practices to streamline your development.