Currently we have an ASP.NET MVC 4 application that serves as the core application to the project with up to 12 other projects within the solution that are deployed to the Areas folder along with the areaRegistration class entry in the sub-app. Each Areas app has a reference added into the core application so that it will be able to resolve the routes and assign IOC settings. The application is using Windows Auth (on a domain) for security and EF for data layers . SignalR is used alongside jQuery and knockout for front-end security, notifications, and other application features. When the application was first created, it was quite small -- containing roughly 4-5 apps within the solution (Core, Shared, Sub-Apps). The application was quite responsive and everything seemed to be working great. But, as the application has grown, containing up to 12 projects, and now takes up to 8 seconds when i call return View();. I have used MiniProfiler to walk through the request pipeline, all the way down to repo calls, and nothing really stands out other than the actual render time. Is there a way to determine what is causing the slowdown after return View()? How can I improve the render performance of the app in general? 

Things I have tried thus far:

* Bundling and minification of global and sub-app js/css files
* Enabling static and dynamic compression and caching
* Increased worker threads
* Disabled sessionState
* ensure debug="false"
* using HttpRuntine.Cache for commonly static data calls
* cleared view engine and specified razor