A Technical Architects View

Need to decide what is "High" – sometimes need to trade between scale and availability – is sometimes a judgement call

Speed of response is critical to website success – Amazon found that a 100ms increase in page response time led to a 1% drop in sales

Toolkit

Browser Test Tools

• Fiddler
• IE Developer Toolbar
• YSlow

Load Test Tools

• TinyGet
• Visual Studio Test Edition
• HP LoadRunner (aka Mercury)

External Tools

• SaaS load testers (eg Keynote)

What Impacts Performance ?

The Workload on the servers

Reducing the Workload on the Servers

• Follow best practice for scalability of SharePoint Farms
• Switch off unused services in SharePoint and Windows
• Separate Authoring Farm from Production Farm
• Set Content Databases on production to be Read-Only
• Use SQL Mirroring to synchronise between the Author and Production Farm (MSS 2010 feature)
• Can switch off services very easily on MSS 2010
• Dont mix secure and insecure content
  • Caching efficiencies
• Apply standard .NET best practices
  • Exception handling
  • Defensively code your applications
  • Do not catch exceptions you cannot handle
  • Fail Early
  • Clean up in Finaly {} blocks
  • Understand how .NET manages objects
• Managed Code best practises
  • Be careful of what is going on under the hood
  • List.items.count will hydrate every item in the list - use SPLIST.ItemCount
  • Properly dispose of objects
  • Aggregation / Rollup
  • Use out of the box controls
  • Use SPLinq
    • Less efficient but safer
  • Never iterate through collections of strongly typed objects
• Deployment techniques
  • Deploy via Features and Solutions
  • Keep Files uncustomized (safe mode parser is very expensive)
• Output caching – use anonymous profile
• BLOB caching
• Offload work to other servers
  • SSL - Resource intensive Can be dealt with by the firewall or dedicated hardware
• Use 2010 Custom Service Apps
  • Allows you to Offload expensive workloads to other servers
• In MSS 2010 use the developer dashboard – tells you where time is being spent loading the page
• For SQL: scale UP to 8 procs, scale OUT after 8 procs
  • Don't skimp on DB Server memory. Recommend 8G small, 16G medium, 32G large
• In MSS 2010 use resource throttling

Reducing the page payload

• Minimise Viewstate – must be as small as possible
• Use Valid XHTML – no INLINE STYLE
• Lazy Load JavaScript Files - remove them on the production farm f possible
• Use IIS Compression
• Payload could be 50% Images
• In web.config -> compilation -> debug =false could save up to 20% of payload.

Reducing the number of requests

• Consolidate files together during the build
  • Minimize the number of js and css files you are deploying – either manually or in MSBuild scripts
• Use content delivery methods
  • Use css sprites – something that allows you consolidate into one image many images and use css to display the correct image - Use the Aptimize product to do this
• Use Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) – if site needs to go worldwide
  • Content Delivery Networks cache content around the world
  • Eg Host streaming media – Smooth HD from Microsoft and Akamai
  • Host standard frameworks – JQuery and AJAX
  • Host Complete Sites - uses Akamai or similar

High Availability

Farm topology

• Apply general availability best practise
• Move other services off your web front end servers
• Consider the usage profile

2010 improvements

• Sandboxed solutions
  • Allow system admin control over resourecs used by custom code
  • Small performance hit for running in a separate thread
• Health Analyser and server monitoring – catch issues earlier
• Patch Management