Azure Performance Issues

I'm running NopCommerce on Azure App Service. Performance is painful. We are already paying for an S3 Standard, which is 4 cores and 7GB of ram. We are paying 220$ CAD a month for this. We bumped up from S1 and S2 after performance was even worse on those smaller instances. S3 seems okay some of the time, but other times it's painfully slow. We are still getting an "F" rating for first byte time from performance testing tools.

Just for total context, we are running S1 database with 20 DTU. I do not think this is the bottleneck, especially because the performance issues seem intermittent.

Any insight? We don't have high traffic at all, and this seems like a lot of money to be spending on hosting to achieve decent performance.

Thank you.

Can you share you site's link? :)

Unfortunately it's a private store, but the url is http://www.experimacsupplies.com

Has nobody else run into performance issues on Azure? We are using a fairly standard NopCommerce setup.

I just installed NopCommerce in Azure from the marketplace.
The installed Version today is 3.7. Could you please update the marketplace? Would be great, also in terms of performance.

Hi Adam,
Do you have any update on this topic?

We are planning to move to Azure VM from our dedicated server, but are not aware of the required machine size and costs to maintain al least the current performance of our site.
I would appreciate a follow-up about your further experience with Azure.
Thank you.

Hi Libor,
in the meanwhile we are running some shops in Azure in Version 4.0. It's running quite smooth thanks to the improvements that have been made by the core team.
If you need any support: we are nopCommerce Gold Solution Providers with plenty of know how. We are happy to help you with a upgrade to the current version.
Please don't hesitate to contact me.
Best regards,
Tobias

In our experience nopcommerce is a rather DB chatty solution, so we had to up the DB DTU.

Its still not good enough, but we are still on 3.9. You will find plenty of tickets about performance on azure for nopcommerce on this forum.