Azure Websites is in beta and Composite C1 3.2 has not been optimized for it, but a wake-up time of several minutes is a bit steep.
I have seen a few 4.0 beta sites run oh Shared instances of Azure Websites and did not experience the same bad performance you report, so perhaps updating to the latest 4.0 beta should improve things. You can use the upgrade package on the beta 2 download page. We have made some optimizations limiting disk I/O (which Azure Websites is very affected by), but honestly not something that should account for the slow start up you experience.
To keep the web application alive you would need some external service to ping the website, like you describe. There is no way to control AppPool life time on Azure Websites as far as I know.
Anything in the Server Log which could explain the bad performance?
I have seen a few 4.0 beta sites run oh Shared instances of Azure Websites and did not experience the same bad performance you report, so perhaps updating to the latest 4.0 beta should improve things. You can use the upgrade package on the beta 2 download page. We have made some optimizations limiting disk I/O (which Azure Websites is very affected by), but honestly not something that should account for the slow start up you experience.
To keep the web application alive you would need some external service to ping the website, like you describe. There is no way to control AppPool life time on Azure Websites as far as I know.
Anything in the Server Log which could explain the bad performance?