SharePoint: Improving Performance

September 23, 2008

In my opinion, SharePoint is a slow poke. Among the reasons:

  • SQL Server bottlenecks
  • My old pal IIS
  • Churning when complex pages experience latency because needed data are scattered far and wide across the SharePoint landscape.

In what has to be the most amazing description of sluggish performance, Microsoft has released SharePoint Performance Optimization: How Microsoft IT Increases Availability and Decreases Rendering Time of SharePoint Sites . This is a 27 page Word document, which I was able to download here.

I scanned the white paper. I did not dig through it. The good stuff appears after the boilerplate about how to find out what part of the SharePoint system is the problem. In my experience, it’s not “one part”. Performance issues arise when there are lots of users, complex “sites”, and when some of the other required servers are tossed into the stew.

A happy quack to Nick MacKechnie who pointed to this Microsoft white paper in his Web log here.

Stephen Arnold, September 23, 2008

Comments

4 Responses to “SharePoint: Improving Performance”

  1. Andreas Grabner on January 24th, 2009 1:56 pm

    I agree with you in some points. I also want to point out that systems that are highly customizable are usually not trimmed on performance for your specific need.
    Its therefore necessary that you understand what you do when customizing a platform like SharePoint. There are many DO’s and DONT’s. Understanding the Platform helps a lot when you write your own WebParts or when you define your Lists, Views and Indices.
    I spent some time analyzing the SharePoint object model to understand how to best develop against sharepoint lists and views and how to best customize it.
    check out my findings at http://blog.dynatrace.com/category/net/sharepoint-net

    Hope this helps

  2. steve on March 8th, 2010 6:43 am

    This is true the SQL bottlenecks does occur that affects SharePoint performance. .NET applications using SQL Server faces same problems, too.

    The issue of SQL can be resolved if BLOBs are not stored in SQL Server but in an external store instead, like EBS.

    Further improvements to SharePoint performance and scalability can be resolved by using a third-party caching solution like Ncachepoint or others that do the same thing. Ncachepoint not only externalizes BLOBs but also caches them. It also caches Lists, Views and Sessions.

    What else to cache? Ncachepoint caches most things that will lead to performance boost. I think Ncachepoint from alachisoft, a company that is already in making caching solutions for .NET has done a good job of making this software for Ncachepoint.

  3. fred on March 9th, 2010 1:16 am

    @steve

    ncachepoint sound very good. like other products that existed before it e.g storagepoint, etc. ncachepoint too externalizes and caches blobs that really help much in putting load off from sql database. moreover, the software is good for caching other ncachepoint stuff as well, it is a good think to look at for heavy sharepoint users

  4. Thomas Trung Vo on June 1st, 2011 2:47 am

    Improve reading files performance for SharePoint 2010 / T?ng hi?u su?t ??c file cho SharePoint 2010 http://sharepointtaskmaster.blogspot.com/2011/06/improve-reading-files-performance-for.html

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