Getting Sitefinity Performance comparable to Demos - Sitefinity - General Discussions

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Posted by Community Admin on 22-Jul-2012 00:00

I have been watching several Sitefinity Demos through Webinars and nearly all of the demos have reasonable performance (not spectacular, by any means) when presenting their content. However, I have a VM running 8 GB of RAM with unlimited memory allocated to the Application Pool for the Sitefinity website and it still takes forever to load and perform operations within the Sitefinity backend.

What type of hardware and what server configurations are being run to perform the Sitefinity demos? Can exact specifications be provided? If I had to guess, the hardware and server configurations are super loaded in order to support reasonable performance demos because the minimum system requirements are certainly not meeting anywhere near the expected performance on any of my test or development environments.

Posted by Community Admin on 23-Jul-2012 00:00

I have noticed some speed improvements in Sitefinity 5.1, but I am wondering if Telerik have done some measurements to see the difference between 5.0 and 5.1 as far as speed goes. It would be useful to have some figures published if possible.
Cheers

Posted by Community Admin on 23-Jul-2012 00:00

I wonder if the demo computers have an SSD as well. (and if the demos are played at 120% speed ;-)

Posted by Community Admin on 24-Jul-2012 00:00

I can't speak for all our video producers, but I frequently trim loading screens out of the video. For the recorded videos, I'm not trying to be deceptive, instead I'm trying to make the videos as short/to-the-point as possible. We used to record longer 20+ minute videos, but we discovered these videos wouldn't get watched. These days we try to keep most videos under 10 minutes and (ideally) less than 5 minutes. This means trimming everything that isn't helping to communicate the core message.

All this being said, for live demos none of this is possible. Recently, we've been using Steve McNiven's Primer script. This can be retrieved using NuGet by typing "Install-Package SitefinityPrimer" into the NuGet console. This thing keeps the Sitefinity backend hot and ensures everything looks really snappy during live demos. Beyond that, I've also had better luck running the website through IIS, rather than Casini.

These are just a few of my personal tips.

Gabe Sumner
Telerik | Sitefinity CMS

Posted by Community Admin on 24-Jul-2012 00:00

@Dan
My office machine is a dual-quad core, 16 gigs of ram running a REVO SSD drive...and it still takes just as much time to load after a build as my way crapper home machine :/

I think the fundamental problem is that it's all these "parts" (services), and each "part" needs to spin alive. Where in 3.x when it's up, it's just up...? I don't know...but I'd like an official answer :)

Posted by Community Admin on 25-Jul-2012 00:00

I used the new Modules feature to disable those I wasn't using... which was more than half of them.

I did notice a modest gain in cold-start time, but the application worker thread is still just as resource hungry as before... currently still sucking up more than 500k.

5.1 is not yet a candidate for low-end shared hosting*, IMHO, but running on a VPS means that I can implement other services and apps to improve performance. I am running the IIS AppWarmup module and a related KeepAlive application, as well as custom IIS Cache and Zip modules for static files.

Cold start times are only an issue when I make changes to the live site (not the content) and the rest of the time, the warmup and keepalive components ensure that the site response is always brisk, and the cache/zip modules help minimise client traffic.

I will say, on my development machine, re-build and cold-starts are a bit frustrating at times, but that's mainly because I'm so stupid and need about 1-million edits to get every change correct... LOL.

*Edit: My comment about not being a candidate for low-end hosting wasn't meant to imply it won't work - I'm sure it will - but that it wasn't a candidate for my use of Sitefinity. I find that a VPS gives me more flexibility, control and options for hosting customer sites as a turn-key solution.

Posted by Community Admin on 14-Aug-2012 00:00

Having good core parts doesn't necessarily mean that wiring them together makes an efficient machine. I'm a huge fan of Telerik Controls and their individual responsiveness, but the 'wiring' on Sitefinity is simply not at the same level. I also run Telligent Community Server 5 side by side on the same server as Sitefinity 5 hitting against the same SQL Server 2008 instance on another box.The Telligent site (which has much more content than my Sitefinity site) loads in under 2 seconds as compared to 8-10+ seconds for Sitefinity and that's using Pingdom to continually hit my Sitefinity site or the loading times are even longer.

Posted by Community Admin on 14-Aug-2012 00:00

@All

To me 5.1 appears to use more RAM and is slower on first call of everything.

Like from Dashboard to Pages and then opening a page feels very very slow the first time you do it. After that if you open the next page to edit 5.1 seems to be much quicker.

Disabling Modules does not seem to have such an big impact on RAM usage or load time when not hot. To me the best thing is still optimizing the site the old way - combining CSS, minimizing stuff from css to images and so on and keep the site warm.

I keep the site warm using a service that checks my site every 2 min if it is up.
a) keeps my site warm
b) informs me when a site is down

I agree that SF is not longer for low end SharedHosting. They never reached the old goal of 250 MB max RAM usage. I never go over 500 MB but I go often to 300 MB.

I was forced to go from Shared to VPS which I did not mind even though it increased the cost of hosting over 3.7. Now that 5.1 seems to be using more RAM then 4.4 it will add costs as well since I can not have as many sites on the same VPS as I used to.

I know that Telerik is looking into optimization on every release but with all the new stuff on the roadmap I simply don't see that we will get much of what we want.

I guess most of us are wishing for 2 cycles of cleaning up SF before introducing new stuff.

Still SF is usability wise the best CMS on the market and i can justify the cost of 500 USD to all my small business clients.

Markus

Posted by Community Admin on 14-Aug-2012 00:00

@Markus

Agreed - I disabled most modules other than the most basic for a standard website, and while I did notice some improvement (which I appreciate) it wasn't anything worth breaking out the party-hats for.

My own experience is similar to yours - The worker thread spins up at about 300MB of Private Memory on first page request... and then continues to grow from there with each additional page request to about the 350-ish mark.

I have seen the Peak Working set at close to 600MB but I don't honestly know the relationship that has with Private Memory... which is the parameter that can be controlled by the IIS admin.

On a VPS it's all a bit of a non-issue, you just make sure you have enough memory and let the worker take what it needs.

However, in an environment where the Private Memory of the worker thread is limited by the provider, this could be an issue, as I would guess that anything below 350MB is going to force the worker thread to be constantly recycling, and it seems that a 250MB limit is quite common for shared hosting providers.

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