When deploying in a single server environment, cold-starts and slow initial load times cannot be avoided as data needs to be fetched and caches needs to be built before the site can load up. To avoid this, many have gone with a blue/green deployment strategy in which one server is deployed to, warmup, and then swap. This allows for zero downtime deployments and no interruptions to your visitors. When utilizing Azure PaaS (azure web apps) for your Sitecore website, it is heavily recommended to utilize staging slots for blue/green and application initialization module for warm up. Recently, I've encountered an issue where the applicationInitialization seemly doesn't work; once the swap completes, we encounter cold-starts and slow initial load times. Our configuration is as follows: <system.webServer> <applicationInitialization > <add initializationPage="/" hostName="mysite.com"/> <add initializationPage="/page-to-warmup...
