Hi there,
From MVC Preview 2 to the recently released MVC Beta from yesterday there have been a lot of changes to Routing. Some of those changes include performance improvements. Here are some tricks to make URL generation more performant in your application:
1. Use named routes. Named routes are an optional feature of routing. The names only apply to URL generation - they are never used for matching incoming URLs. When you specify a name when generating a URL we will only try to match that one route. This means that even if the named route you specified is the 100th route in the route table we'll jump straight to it and try to match.
2. Put your most common routes at the beginning of the route table. This will improve performance of both URL generation as well as processing incoming URLs. Routing works based on the rule that the first match wins. If the first match is the 100th route in your route table, then that means it had to try 99 other routes and none of them matched.
3. Don't use URL generation. Some people like it, some people don't. It's a bit tricky to master. It's nice to use if your URLs are very dynamic but it can be a bit of a hassle when you have very few URLs to begin with and perhaps you don't care about exactly what they look like.
My favorite option is #1 since it's super easy to use and it also makes URL generation more deterministic from the app developer's perspective (that'syou!).
Thanks,
Eilon