Sooooooo slow!

Hi,

I've been using SF4 for about 5 months and I just cannot believe how slow it is, not the frontend so much, but trying to work in the backend and use the modules is just unbelieveably slow - sometimes I go into a module such as news, click on a news article to edit and have to wait 2-3 minutes for the next screen to load, in fact sometimes it just doesnt load and I have to repeat the process.

Does anyone else have this problem? And can Telerik advise whether this is majorly improved in the 4.1 release? I have seen figures stating "now 35% faster", but even 35% wouldnt change this much!

Thanks
higgsy

Hello higgsy,

Does this problem persists if you use our Project Manager? I have not see such delay so far in our modules. How many items you have? Which views you are trying to open?

Best wishes,
Ivan Dimitrov
the Telerik team

Hi all,

I just wanted to say that it appears to be Firefox 4 that is slow, not SF.

Cheers
higgsy

I must say, I thought the latest release was a bit slow, but did not post
because I though it might be me. Speed-wise it is definitely not better,
but I might be wrong.

Thanks,
Andrei

I can second that, I upgraded our clients site to the latest version over the weekend and I come in today to find out that the backend is really slow. Having tested I can confirm.

Can someone from Telerik/Sitefinity team respond please.
thanks

Hi There,

Just run fidler or simlair tool and you will see the amount of requests going back and forth to the server. It is due to using the RESTFull WCF methods. If you are optimizing a site, the general rule is less requests to the server is better (YSlow). Using RESTFull WCF would still be cool if you could split the admin from the website e.g. have a dedicated server for content editing/publishing and a dedicated farm to server browsing. Just my 2 cents worth...

Can I ask,

Is there a list of things that I can do (configuration-wise) to speed it up
a bit? I literally clicked the Publish button, went downstairs to the kitchen 
to get a glass of water, came back up and I still had to wait a bit. I am sure
I am doing something wrong. Could it be my PC?

Thanks,
Andrei

@Andrei

Well you could get a bigger house where the kitchen is further away. That way publishing would be finished by the time you return. (Sorry had to write that)

I have sometimes wait periods but never had one over a minute.

In order to know if it is your computer we would have to know the speed of your internet connection as well as the specs of your computer.

In fiddler2.com you see what the traffic is and therefore find out more about what is taking long to load and especially what amount of date is beeing transfered. Many times you have 1 MB going  back and forth - so your internet connection could be a bottle neck.

PageSpeed with Chrome for example also gives a good input what can be optimized.

Sorry that I am not able to help more.

Markus

PS: If a bigger house is no option you could fix a sandwich instead of the glass of wather. That would also work :-)

@Markus Berchtold

Thanks for your help. I will get a bigger house I think, with a bigger kitchen and a nice sandwich toaster
as well, just to be sure. If that does not work, then I don't know what else will.

Many thanks,
Andrei

This week I had a client asking me to do some changes to the website that i have developed for them a while ago. It is built on top of Siteifnity 3.7 so again I had a chance to play around with the old version and it appeared to me that I really miss the good old days. Although you get to experience continuous postbacks throughout the CMS but you still find it responsive.

I think you didn't really need a large house to work on Sitefinity 3.7 but definitely not a room in a dorm.

I think the Sitefinity team should really consider focusing on what is there and drastically improving it in the next few releases instead of setting a roadmap full of astonishing features but built on top of a product that might end up running as slow as a giant tortoise.

Rather, give us something that we can build on that could run as fast as a ferrari and we will do a great job customizing it. We are really good at that. Not only we will be tremendously thankful to you, but also our work will be truthfully appreciated by our clients.

Finger crossed for the coming months, and always counting on the commitment and the tremendous effort that the Sitefinity team is dedicating for the next release(s).

Thanks,

George

Hi George,

Thanks for your honest opinion. 
In every major release or a service pack until now, we were delivering some performance improvement. This will continue with each new version as well. It's important the system has the potential, and we are addressing the main pain points quickly.

Best wishes,
Georgi
the Telerik team

Sitefinity 4 has been a huge disappointment from a company that I think very highly of. It was released embarrassingly behind schedule. I had egg on my face several times by mentioning released timeframes to clients only to be let down. Now that it has been released, it is hugely plagued with problems. Rarely am I seeing any praise of it on forums of blog posts. Mostly reports of every problem under the sun and rants about pricing structure, performance, and convoluted development practices. 


I was on the team that developed what I am sure is the largest Sifefinity 3.7 site out there (top 10 U.S. government site). I loved the product and plugged it every chance I got. Unfortunately, that is not the case with 4. I even have had clients asking to be reverted back to 3. I cannot recommend SF in any good conscience as it exists today and am looking for another CMS.


Projects are taking way too long. I still cannot overcome the incredible performance problems in the back end. The entire system comes to a crawl when there is any sort of load. And, my support overhead is through the roof (mostly due to performance and hosting issues). In my opinion, version 4 had drug the Sitefinity name through the mud and it will be difficult to recover. 


I think people trusted the product too quickly because of the success of previous versions. This is the risk you take with a complete rewrite of a product. These issues need to be fix VERY quickly or you risk losing all of you best sales people - developers.

We did have issues with the speed of the back-end when developing/debugging -- if the databases are not on localhost, it is very slow.    Whenever we're in development, we'll make a copy of the client database to our local machines and have the sql there, change our config and then it's super fast.

Overall though, quite happy with sitefinity 4 :)

Chris
http://www.opacitydesign.com/work

Hello Eric,

Thanks for the feedback. I am not sure if you are following all the service packs and updates we are providing - although we are not fixing everything possible, I think we are quite fast with the updates. Won't you agree, that almost every update is making the system more stable and fast?

Regards,
Georgi
the Telerik team

could the solution for the back end slow response is the DB connection ?
did someone tried moving the DB to the same machine in development and got a better results ?

we have here 3 developers in my team and most of the time wait when change content in the back end pages

Hi,

7 months down the line and Sitefinity can still not run under both anonymous and integrated security enabled, it completely breaks the backend. How long before we can have this simple bit of functionality.

Regards,
Jean Erasmus

Hi Jean,

7 months down the line and Sitefinity can still not run under both anonymous and integrated security enabled, it completely breaks the backend. How long before we can have this simple bit of functionality.

I think that it is just general frustration that is coming out. I have never been so frustrated with a product that I want to love so much. 

The issue is not a local DB. I have a very beefy machine (Quad i7 processor - 12GB RAM) with SQL server running locally. Still VERY slow in every regard. Our production machine (which we have 12 3.x sites running very happily) is very powerful. Local DB on there as well. We get complaints all the time from customer who wait forever for a page to load. 

Georgi, yes, you guys make an very good effort to get fixes out quickly. I try to stay on top of all of the updates. I have had severe difficulty upgrading sites. My latest episode involved the "RepairOrphanedControls fix" and took me 8 hours to finally get the site rendering again (actually did not use RepairOrphanedControls in the end because I could not get it going - had to just recreate most things).

Jean is right though. 7 months down the road and we are fixing very fundamental things (like public pages taking insane amounts of time to render). Again, when we actually have customer asking to be downgraded because of continued problems - we have a serious issue here.

I love Telerik, but I cannot sugarcoat anything here. I am very upset with the direction SF has gone...

Eric

Today I had a customer who was supposed to be loading content and was taking way too long. She told me she quits after about an hour out of frustration. Says the backend is unusable and she wants to pull her hair out. They trusted me to choose SF based on my track record. I trusted Telerik based on their track record. Again, egg on my face. 

It has been 3 months since I developed the site and it is still not live. 

Dear Eric

Sorry to read your frustration. Here are my two cents on that matter

a) Make sure you are NOT running 4.1 SP2. To me SP2 introdruced about a 30-50% decreese in speed - Therefor make sure you upgrade to 4.1 SP3 much much better

b) I am located in Europe an run a site hosting in the US and do not have times where the page crawles

c) First load time of FrontEnd takes way to long. Try to warm up your site if you do not get to much traffic - I have a job on the server testing access to the page every 3 minutes (I know you are talking about back-end)

d) get Jing and take some screencast on performance so we can see what it feels like. How slow it is to you and maybe we can then caputure some of our performances in real life sites

e) use fiddler2 or any other tool to see where or what might be causing the slowness of you backends

f) try it in different times. If you are in the US try a time where most are asleep and see if its faster then. It might be a bottle neck with your provider.

g) If all this is done and you don't get a solution, then write to me mb @ marktold.com and I will set up a 4.1 SP3 demo acount with my provider Arvixe (which I am quite happy with - run a VPS there) and we can test it from your side and my side We can compare it then and see if you have different response times.

If its as faster then your site, we know its either the server or the setup. If its slower then from my side the bottle neck must be internet connection somewhere. (Sorry I am away till 16. August - therefor such testing would have to be done after that date)

Bottom line to me is:

1) FrontEnd first time load should be improved by many SECONDS in my opinion
2) One the Site is warm, the front to me seems resonably fast (not the fastest, but fast)
3) Backend is not super fast, but to me absolutely workable. I usually tell the clients that all the functionality simply needs to be transmitted.
4) Make sure you upgrade to SP3
5) Try Chrome - To me chrome is the fastest and even IE8 feels faster then FF 5

Hope this helps. Telerik has still a lot of things to do on Sitefinity but I see a huge improvement since Febrary. 4.0 to me was beta. 4.1 was a faulty release. 4.1 SP3 is finaly a realase I would call 4.0 :-)

One thing I am absolutely postiv is that with Telerik you get the best support you can get anywhere and the guys and gals are going out of the ordornary way to help you.

Have a nice day.

Markus

This thread is becoming a nice collection of optimization tips.  (Markus you rock!)

--

I'll underscore a few points.  First, keep your web site upgraded and don't ignore the service packs.  The team is introducing substantial performance improvements with each release.  The upcoming 4.2 release will be no different.  

I'm as guilty as anyone about letting software get outdated and ignoring incremental Service Packs, but in Sitefinity's current evolution we're making substantial gains weekly.  

--

Secondly, lack of memory will pummel the web site into the ground.  I've seen Sitefinity 4.x deployed to shared hosting accounts where it exceeds the memory allotment every few minutes.  As Markus describes, application start-up is slow.  We'll work to reduce this, but it's always going to be relatively slow.  When Sitefinity exceeds the memory allotment then the entire application gets shut-down and must be restarted.  

As a content editor, this creates a horrible experience.  Open a page, do some edits, click Publish, time out, refresh, wait 60 seconds, try again...  Also, keep in mind that regardless of how great the underlying server is, there is an IIS setting that determines how much memory is allocated to the Application Pool.  I've seen dedicated servers where this Application Pool memory setting was set too low.  Sitefinity's system requirements recommend a minimum of 500MB.

--

Lastly, each page you create in Sitefinity has a Cache setting that should probably be enabled.  In fact, we now make this the default setting.  However, earlier versions of Sitefinity did not default to enabled.  If you're upgrading from an older version of Sitefinity, be sure to toggle this setting on.

--

There are lots of other tips.  However, these are a few items that spring to mind.

P.S.  I've been working with some of our internal builds for the upcoming 4.2 build and I think you'll be pleased.  

Gabe Sumner
Telerik | Sitefinity CMS

Gabe,

I've got to say, it's great to hear things are constantly improving and I look forward to v 4.2.

My frustration has been that quite simply Sitefinity was not ready to be used in production, IMHO Telerik were wrong to release it, but worse, wrong to encourage us to use it - severe egg on our faces for using such a buggy product on a clients website. Yes, bugs have been fixed in service packs, but upgrading from one to the next is extremely painful - i've upgraded microsoft exchange servers with less trouble! The client is of course not willing to pay for N number of days to upgrade the product, so so far my SF4 projects have been extremely unprofitable.

I'll continue to persevere with Sitefinity, but I feel a little more thought about the people and partners that are actually out there selling Sitefinity is needed. The whole release of Sitefinity 4 has been sugar coated in my opinion, where a little more honesty and respect for our businesses would have been appreciated.

higgsy

Hey Higgsy, 

Sitefinity 4.x has been a rough start.  This was acknowledged a few months ago by extending the licenses of all early adopters.  There are also some forum posts by Martin & Vassil elsewhere also on this subject.  Internally there is a strong understanding that we need to re-establish trust with our customers.

I appreciate your perseverance with Sitefinity and simultaneously understand the residual frustration.  That frustration isn't going to go away overnight, but through a continual series of solid releases and steady improvements we hope to re-establish your trust.  This has already started, but should continue with 4.2.  

Gabe Sumner
Telerik | Sitefinity CMS

Dear higgsy

I agree that 4.0 was not even beta stage. And the problem was that Telerik did pull the plug on 3.7. If they would have extended the sale of 3.7 till now or even the end of the year we would have had a choice.

This was the problem. Why would you buy a 4.0 license and start with 3.7 and upgrade (which I would never ever even consider if I had my own stuff programmed. I guess I would not even dare with out of the box)

But there are two things about this mistake they made

a) they took a bashing for it - and I am suppriesed that the core developers did not walk away becaus usually I don't like to eat the soup where management has put so  much salt in that every spoon almost kills you.

b) on thing I learnd in more then 2 years of military service. No mather how cold you are, how wet and hungry, how tired - everything will come to an end and the sun will shine again. At the moment I see some sunlight on the horizon. With 4.2.

I have only one fear and have written this many time. Yes I have been told e-commerce is a different team, battle field. But to me - before even considering new modules Telerik must really fix all, and with all I mean 100 out of 100.

Make the core stable and finish what you started.

For example the  forms module is still a joke. One guy does for the market place what Telerik seams to be unable to do (e-mail results). Layouting in px mode is simply NOT possible.

Get all bugs listed in PITS - I rather see 1000 bugs and 900 solved then never know if Telerik still remembers stuff or not. (I know a new PITS should be online sooner or later)

PageGroup still does not redirect URL to first SubPage, resulting in Submenu selected not beeing applied. So you need to programm stuff.

ContentPlaceholder still got no names and if you have a two 30pixel heigh divs they overlay each other so its hard to select the right one. Once you droped it to the wrong it can be an advanture to delete it.

4 eye workflow is not possible - Just role based. Which is nice for corporations with 10 editors and 3 admins. Small firms are left out.

Include the backend languages by default. Who cares about 3 more MB if you have a 100 MB first upload. But no need to add the languages manually (which at the moment does not work in SBE :-))

Let us change the start page of the backend. Dashboard is Dashboring.

Let us see how many pages we are using in SBE

This are just some that pop into my mind.

-------------------

Once again a great compliment for all Telerik stuff for going through this hard times with us. It was no vacation for them either and they really had to take a lot of the heat, which they did not deserver.

Hope Telerik focuses again on getting the core ready to shine again

Markus

@Gabe - ok well im certainly looking forward to the updates. I must have missed the public acknowledgement, I did of course receive the extended support license, but I never realised why.

@Markus - you couldn't be more right. I've complained to my account manager several times, why the heck do you add new functionality when the core is so unstable (im not saying its unstable now, but new features have been bening added from the start when we were screaming for bug fixes) - I also cannot possibly accept that the guys working on the ecommerce modules have never interfered with the progress of the core CMS (even if they were locked in a basement, the added complexity of merging the ecommerce modules into sitefinity would for sure have extended deadlines and hidden complications) - we've all been there loads of times!

PITS is still, well its the PITS. The support staff have been great throughout, I can imagine they are exhausted, and so I do appreciate it's been difficult for them. I'm not pointing fingers at anyone, but it's not the developers that make the deadlines, put the commercial interests before the reputation of the product and company, and not usually the developers who manage the project. Ultimately, the methods and procedures that Telerik have in place need reviewing urgently, for a software company, their software release process is a shambles.

As I said to Gabe, I'll persevere, but thats mainly because I have a heck of a lot of time invested into Sitefinity (as any developer does with their chosen CMS), but if things remain as they have been I'll bite the bullet as many others have done and go through that painful learning curve with another CMS.

higgsy

Guys,

I have a customer reporting that one of the pages which they update very often (4 times a day), has started to become
slower and slower when loading it in edit mode. Now, they say that they have to wait up to 30 seconds for it to load in edit mode. They say that it used to be much faster.

What do you think may affect it over time, that would slow it down like that?

Many thanks,
Andrei

Hey Andrei,

It could be the content, do they keep adding to it? Are they pulling external data in? Loading 3000x3000px images? Are there external waits?

To tackle it, I'd suggest the following:
First check the SF error log for messages. Secondly run the page with Yslow/Fiddler/Pagespeed and the NET tab from Firebug on the FrontEnd, and determine what the bottleneck is.

A 90+ Yslow rating can be achieved with Sitefinity 4.2 on the BackEnd overviews, I personally wouldn't call that slow and if you're not hitting that check your settings. On an average page edit (content/images/widgets) in the backend I'm dropping down to about 80-85 score and cold load (empty cache) I'm max 10sec on a full featured page edit with an external db.

Check the slow page on the backend and compare it to general Sitefinity backend usage. Check your caching settings, both server & Sitefinity wise.

Some general might work in the dark tries:
Delete some page revisions. Reorganize your DB (Tasks > Shrink > db > Check reorganize flag). Tweak your IIS settings / priority/memory.

Jochem.

Jochem,

Thanks for getting back. It is a plain HTML page, that gets edited a few times a day. So the page in itself is quite light. Do you think that because it has many revisions it is slow? It should not load all the revisions untill you access the Revision History page, I think. I will have to investigate that.

Many thanks anyway,
Andrei

I totally agree with you guys that the backend is very slow and very buggy. For example in the Content > News when you add new custom field soon or later you will get duplicate entry in sf_news_items table which makes your news management content keep reloading. This bug is also occur in Content > Event. And there is no solution for this problem. And of course developing sitefinity custom module is very slow because it's very difficult and takes so many steps

Hi,

Aldo and Adnrei, please open up separate support tickets/forum threads where you describe your problems with performance. Be sure to provide us complete information on your site set up, machine configuration, IIS configuration and specific versions of Sitefinity used.

Aldo, from the description of your problem I get the impression that your website is using an older version of Sitefinity 4.x. Have you tried the latest Sitefinity 4.2 or Sitefinity 4.2 SP1? You will notice there that there are a lot of changes performance and memory consumption wise. Also in the first iterations where we added the additional fields functionality you had to perform a site restart to apply the new field to the database. It it possible that you are not restarting the website after you add the field?

Regards,
Radoslav Georgiev
the Telerik team

Actually I'm tired to update this cms. I have upgraded from sitefinity 4.0 to 4.1 then to 4.1 sp 1. Then telerik release 4.2 and 4.2 sp1. Why did you release this cms quickly when still full of bug? I think you miss understood I mean adding new custom field like this www.sitefinity.com/.../creating-a-new-custom-field.aspx

I know this is an old thread, but I just wanted to post my experience as I'm currently waiting this very minute on Sitefinity to load up.

I've been developing exclusively on Sitefinity for well over a year now, starting with version 5.x and now on 8.2. Used several version in between.

I can honestly say in all the versions I've developed with, nothing has ever changed in terms of speed that I have noticed. When it comes to performance on initial boot up Sitefinity is an absolute slug. I literally can wait 3, 5, sometimes 10 full minutes for a website to boot up to the home page. For the life of me I cannot comprehend what they could be possibly doing that takes so damn long for a website to boot up.

That said, I can't really say I'm surprised. After doing a thorough examination of their API and also the markup that they render on the front end, it's clear to me that they don't have a single senior developer on staff, let alone an architect.

Pete,

i used to experience problems with SiteFinity (amongst another 1000 issues of all sorts), and quite honestly fixing it was really easy, in fact in just three easy steps.

1) Open web browser

2) download EPiServer or umbraco 

3) Never look back at any telerik products again in your life!

Honestly, a junior developer could build a better CMS with the Entity framework and MVC scaffolding!!

I am grateful I no longer waste a minute of my life with their appalling products.

Hope my comprehensive 

To demonstrate just how appalling their development is - I couldn't  even finish my previous reply because their website doesnt work properly on an iPhone - my fault no doubt for having such a rare phone!!

Though in your case things do sound even worse. (I'm about a minute which annoys me still)

I have no idea of your setup of course but life is better when the Database is local, or at least on a near by server. (Ie you are not developing locally and using a database up I the cloud in another continent.)

I had one person affected badly because of their Anti Virus. You can look to exclude your source folder from Anti Virus scans.

Use IIS or IIS Express to run the site.

There is also a good post on Google Groups, discussing this. That may help you.

plus.google.com/.../7soVWsrr11J

Thanks for the ideas and insight Darrin. I don't recall .net web forms loading this slow at all, but then it's been 2009 since I built my last web forms app (been strictly using MVC since then).

My local environment should be more than sufficient. Intel dual core cpu @ 3.8GHz, 16GB of RAM, database is on local machine, and I use IIS express.

I've read up and followed the recommendations on several different optimization strategies, but nothing seems to help. I feel like I'm in the exact same boat as several of the other developers in the Google group link you shared. Every time I make a small change to server side code I have to wait several minutes for Sitefinity to load......and it's infuriating! 30-60 minutes per day spent waiting on Sitefinity to boot up.

Hello Pete,

What I can also suggest is that you take a look at this KB article for some performance tips:

http://www.sitefinity.com/developer-network/knowledge-base/details/performance-tips

Regards,
Sabrie Nedzhip
Telerik

We are also working on performance optimizations to speed up our Sitefinity websites.  One of our Sitefinity databases is over 20 GB.  We have NOT implemented these yet, but once I have I can report back on them.

Here are two things we are getting ready to try...

First, we are looking at rebuilding our database indexes.  We found that MOST of our database indexes are 99% fragmented and this could be slowing down server side queries.  Ideally you should not have more than 10% fragmentation on your database indexes.   For more details on this see Sitefinity's documentation http://docs.sitefinity.com/for-developers-rebuild-database-indexes-manually. 

Second, I am looking at cranking up HTTP compression.  IIS has two compression settings, one for static files and another for dynamic files, such as AXD files.  These compression settings are just a number between 0 and 10.  0 is no compression and 10 is max compression.  By default static files are set to 7 and dynamic files are set to 0.  Yes, that correct.  Just check IIS documentation here... https://www.iis.net/configreference/system.webserver/httpcompression/scheme

I recommend taking a look at this post from Andrew Connell about increasing your dynamic compression and he also talks about enabling a setting that allows IIS to cache the compressed dynamic contents for improved performance.  His article indicates a 21% improvement in performance with just this change alone.

http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/Limiting-the-Page-Payload-with-IIS-HTTP-Compression

As with any change to your environment, make sure you test them first and backup your production environment before applying these changes.  

Enjoy.  :-)