Improving Blazor WebAssembly apps

There are common ways to improve Blazor WebAssembly apps. We'll look at some of the most popular ones now.

Enabling Blazor WebAssembly AOT

By default, the .NET runtime used by Blazor WebAssembly is doing IL interpretation using an interpreter written in WebAssembly. Unlike other .NET apps, it does not use a just-in-time (JIT) compiler, so the performance of CPU-intensive workloads is lower than you might hope for.

In .NET 6, Microsoft has added support for ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation, but you must explicitly opt-in because although it can dramatically improve runtime performance, AOT compilation can take several minutes on small projects like the ones in this book and potentially much longer for larger projects. The size of the compiled app is also larger than without AOT—typically twice the size. The decision to use AOT is therefore based on a balance of increased compile and browser download times, with potentially much...