Use the following setting in the in the machine.config to reduce the startup time of the application.
<configuration>
<runtime>
<generatePublisherEvidence enabled="false"/>
</runtime>
</configuration>
In one of the recent projects, the home page took ~54 seconds to load on IISreset. This came down to ~10 seconds by the above setting in machine.config.
When generatePublisherEvidence element is set to true, the signed assemblies needs to verified by the Certificate Authority. This requires network/internet access increasing the cost. In our performance environment, the web server had no internet access and .NET would timeout after 45 seconds.
Some references on this
See authenticode verification section in
1) http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc337892.aspx
Also see