Thanks for joining me on the SharePoint Performance session. As promised, below you’ll find the Q&A and all applicable links for getting at the content.
Question and Answer
Q: What do you do if you site is not exposed to the internet?
A. For testing the performance of your Intranet sites you can Visual Studio Test tools, or Fiddler.
Fiddler http://www.fiddler2.com/fiddler2
Q: How can I check to see if a slow loading SharePoint page has closed webparts?
A. The way to check for closed webparts is ?contents=1 at the end of the url
Example: http://www.sharepointjoel.com/default.aspx?contents=1
Brings up the webpart maintenance page and I can see the categories and a content editor webpart that are closed. These are affecting the performance of the page negatively and providing little value. Now if I at some point want to re-add the categories web part, I should not delete it. As well, a content editor web part will need to be recreated. There is no recycle bin for restoring deleted content in a content editor web part.
Q: You might mention that the webpagetest.org is completely open and list the site you look up.
A: You can mark your performance check private by simply checking the box to do so.
Q: It seems as though webpagetest.org cannot check https site -
A: I’d suggest using Fiddler or Visual Studio Test tools.
Q: what about 64-bit vs 32-bit MOSS
A. The ongoing question of 32bit vs 64 bit huh? Well 32bit is faster at smaller workloads and 64 bit is more scalable. The short answer is… SharePoint 2010 supports only 64bit, so if you’re planning on upgrade, your upgrade will be smoother if you’re running 64 bit. As well, you’ll find Microsoft support regularly recommends/requires upgrading to 64 bit to address performance and scale issues.
Q: What is meant by dedicating an app pool to customizations?
A: Essentially when you create your SharePoint web applications you choose which application pool should be used. My recommendation is to consolidate your “vanilla” or out of the box web applications together, and dedicate an application pool that’s heavily customized in its own application pool. Not only will this isolate the customized web application memory space, but also make it much easier to determine if it is the problem if you have memory issues. Essentially it’s giving you memory isolation on your custom apps.
Q: How well does Web Page Test work with jQuery and other AJAX type solutions
A: It will download the javascript as well as the page and images. It does not click through, it’s a simple page render so AJAX calls would rarely be applicable.
Q: Have any of you had issues with installing the WCF (kb971831) in 2010? I've had servers that don't let me install 2010 due to this not been installed - but when I attempt to install it, it claims the server doesn't require it
A: Refer to the installation troubleshooting steps on SharePoint 2010
Q: What is a reasonable load time expectation or goal for a public facing web page with little or no multimedia content and for a page with multimedia content? Is there an industry standard and or resources to help determine what it should be?
A: Joel: While SLAs are frequently driven by business objectives, on the intranet there isn’t really a standard, but should be based on the goals of the company. There are so many factors that play into this including uncontrolled latency and utilization over the internet for example. 5 Seconds is commonly a user acceptance barrier that many are not willing to wait beyond without a progress bar.
Michael Iem: 5 seconds or less is the industry standard and we'll be releasing a study on fortune 500 companies shortly benchmarking site speeds. www.aptimize.com
Q: Our user & profiles list is more than 2000 items & i see it imports like 18000 users, which is causing slowness issue
A: The User Profiles aren’t restricted to 2000 items. In fact Microsoft’s own tests included up to 1 million users with SharePoint 2007. If you are having issues with profile imports you may have a configuration or other timer job related issues. If you’re simply seeing it’s slow you may look at the bottlenecks related to the import timer job.
Q: You mentioned closed web parts can hurt performance. Is there a tool to identify closed web parts in 2007?
A: I don’t recommend systematically deleting closed webparts, since it could be that it’s closed on purpose. There are reasons you may close a webpart with the intention of adding it back later. If you look at your slow loading pages you can use the web parts maintenance page (appending ?contents=1) to easily delete closed webparts. Just be careful about content in the content editor webparts.
Q: If you just backed up your SharePoint SQL databases, would that be enough? Are there scripts already written to backup your sharepoint environment?
A: SharePoint backup is not simple enough to just use SQL unfortunately. Much of the configuration of SharePoint is in the config database and not restorable in SharePoint 2007. All of the services (SSP) in 2007 require a separate backup such as the SharePoint backup to be able to restore them.
Q: What is a good way to track down the location of a disposal error? I've tried adding the SPRequestStackTrace key to the registry but the information is difficult to interpret.
A: Refer to this article: Using Disposable Objects in Windows SharePoint Services “Learn best practices to follow when using Windows SharePoint Services objects to avoid retaining the objects in memory in the Microsoft .NET Framework. (29 printed pages)”
Q: Did you menton about External Blob storage as one technique to improve performance ?
A. I didn’t mention that, but I do see some third parties claiming performance improvements.
Q: is there any downside of having large site collection of 100 gb+ more from performance standpoint
A: Yes, the larger the database the more likelihood for larger lists, the larger the list the more likely there are views that are not optimized for performance. As well backup performance both to disk and to tape can cause performance issues.
Q: How does performance suffer with alot of web apps on a wfe? Is there a suggested limit?
A: With each additional web application you have additional memory overhead. If they are consolidated in a single app pool this will help, but if not combined each app pool will contain at a mimimum of 200MB of memory and more likely 500MB to 1 or even 2GB per active worker process. Suggested limit is fewer is better. Somewhere under 10 is preferred and even there, consolidate your app pools as much as you can for better performance. There are some hosters getting away with 100 web apps across 4 app pools, but this isn’t recommended for the average customer.
Q. Can I get a copy of the recording?
A. Sure you can get it here: http://www.aptimize.com/blog/webinar-sharepoint-admins
Q. I missed the first half of the presentation what did it cover and where can I get it?
A. Here’s the mail you should receive with details on the presentation.
You recently expressed an interest in the Joel Oleson webinar:
10 Steps to Optimizing SharePoint 2007/2010 Performance for IT Administrators
As promised we've made the presentation and live recording available:
http://www.aptimize.com/blog/webinar-sharepoint-admins
Joel covered:
- Storage optimization
- Page optimization
- Webpart optimization
- List optimization
- End to end browser optimization
- Performance Tools to make your job easier
- Caching
Aptimize demo:
Used by Microsoft on SharePoint.com, Mike Iem from Aptimize showed how the Aptimize Website Accelerator is reducing SharePoint page loads by 33%-75%.
For more information contact Mike Iem mike.iem@aptimize.com or 1800-935-8414