Admin Session Timeouts Frequently

I have a client that we are building out their website using sitefinity 4.0 RC on discount asp.  They are having issues where they are creating content in the CMS and it keeps expiring there session after 10-15 minutes.  I noticed this myself when i was modifying pages/templates etc and it is very annoying. 

Is this a license issue since the site was setup as a trial of sitefinity, we currently are in the process of purchasing a 3.7 license that has the free upgrade to 4.0.  Or is it something else i can fix quickly for them now.

Thx
Michael

No Admin response to this yet?  I shouldn't have to right custom anything to fix this issue.  My clients are not happy that they get logged out in less than 15 minutes when they are in the middle of editing content on their soon to be live site.  They are getting frustrated and want this resolved quickly.

Hi Michael,

We can reproduce this issue only when the application pool gets recycled and there is an AJAX request followed by some HTTP request. It looks like your case is the same, because you experience the issue on 15-20 minutes which is the default time stamp for application pool recycling. For this case we logged a bug with ID 102446

Could you check whether your application pool gets recycled? Which hosting plan you use with discountasp.net? Can you replicate the issue on a local server where you have hosted the project on an IIS server and using VS web server?

All the best,
Ivan Dimitrov
the Telerik team

We are using discount asp's Windows 2008 - IIS 7.0 plan along with sql server 2008.   I don't seem to have control over setting the app pool recycle time in our discount asp account.  I can only recycle it manually.  I haven't yet had time to test it locally using VS.

I was reading some people setup a scheduled task through discountasp when trying to speed up sitefinity 3.7.  I did this for our 4.0 site and will see if that helps at all.

Hi Michael,

Ok, I logged  the problem with app pool recycling for fixing, so it should be fixed for the official release or earlier in one of our internal builds.

Best wishes,
Ivan Dimitrov
the Telerik team

Thanks.  If it does get fixed in an internal build is there anyway to get that code before the final release?

Hi Michael,

We have weekly builds, so the fix could appear in them if we manage to sort out the issue before the official release. Currently it is logged for fixing for the next week.

All the best,
Ivan Dimitrov
the Telerik team

Great.  Thanks Ivan.

Was this fixed in RC2, i didn't see it mentioned?

Hi Michael,

The issue is not fixed in the RC2, because of another bug that prevents us from fixing the first one.

Best wishes,
Ivan Dimitrov
the Telerik team

Ivan,

Do you have any timetable to have this fixed?  Our client is very upset when they are trying to use 4.0 to build out their site and have it ready to go when the final release for 4.0 is ready.    It is also frustrating for myself since i cannot upload anything in bulk without it timing out and killing the uploads. I have to do one a time logging in then logging out then logging in again.  Sometimes even then it hangs and i have to go into discountasp and recycle the web app or else the entire site is down.  It gets even worse when 2 people are trying to upload stuff. 

Is there at least any workaround for this, i was able to gain IIS access to our discount asp hosted website if there is something in there i can do to band-aid this problem for the time being.

Is there anyone else out there using discountasp with sitefinity 4.0 or am i the only one with this issue?  This is more than just some 15-20 minutes session state issue.

Thx
Michael

Hello Michael,

We will try to fix the issue before the official release scheduled in  the middle of January. You could try to increase the System Idle Time out value of IIS ( if you have access) and your private memory which should prevent the application pool from recycling.

Best wishes,
Ivan Dimitrov
the Telerik team

I spoke with discount asp and confirmed that it is indeed the memory issue causing the constant app pool recycles.  This is what they had to say.

"The application is indeed being recycled due to memory usage. Unfortunately, there is nothing we can do as we do not offer accounts with more than 200MB's of memory at this time. Im sorry we could not accommodate your request.

Please let us know if you have any further questions.

Thank you,

Mikey

DiscountASP.NET is a Microsoft Gold Partner
Team Foundation Server Hosting | ASP.NET Web Hosting"

Maybe http://www.sitefinity.com/4.0/documentation/installation-and-administration-guide/installing-sitefinity/system-requirements.aspx should also state some minium hardware requirements.

I feel like the shared hosting solutions are going down the drain with 4.0 - somehow I feel like 4.0 needs a lot more serverside then 3.7 - To me 3.7 might was  a hassle to set up but easy to run with my provider. Now for its the other way around. easy to set up but hard to run :-)

Happy New Year to all of you

And I guess to all Teleriks SF Stuff good look for the January 14th (you need it :)

Markus

Hi Michael and Markus,

We are aware of the 200 MB limit for shared hosting providers. We have set up a test environment for this case where the website memory should not exceed this amount. We are testing the memory consumption of Sitefinity and have it on the plan to optimize memory usage.

Greetings,
Radoslav Georgiev
the Telerik team

Any updates if this fix is going to make RTM?

Do you have the option to use SQL Server to store session state?  Then, the session would stay around even when the app pool recycles.

Yes, i've tried that, doesn't help at all, still have the same problems everytime the app pool recyles, the uploads just hang forever, i have the refresh the page, click through a bunch of return 0 popup windows(# of pop ups depends on # of uploads that didn't work) then it still logs you out and you have to re log in again.

was this fixed in the RTM released on friday?????

This issues is not resolved in RTM yet. As a result of which, we nearly had a disastrous weekend at the AZGiveCamp.

At our GiveCamp, 4 teams were suppossed to use Sitefinity for their projects. We spent entire friday trying to set up websites on Verio. Then Saturday morning, we bought a Virtual Private Server account on GoDaddy thinking there might be some problem with Verio.

We created a seperate Application Pool for each of the websites. It started working correctly. However, after 15 - 20 mins, all the websites crashed. We went back and forth with Telerik and finally they confirmed it was a bug in Sitefinity and not hosting providers.

Gabe Sumner logged the error here : www.Sitefinity.com/GiveCamp

GiveCamp is 48 hrs and we've wasted critical 20 hrs in setting up Sitefinity. Finally, two teams moved to Orchard CMS, One team dropped from the camp ( too less time to create anything worthwhile, they are going to spend another weekend to finish the project ) and finally one team struck with Sitefinity CMS and finished the project on a dedicated server. 

At this point, only one Sitefinity Website can run on a server, even if it is dedicated.... 

Guess it's not yet ready for Prime Time....

Hi Larry.

Sorry for the troubles with Sitefinity at GiveCamp.  If you're interested in some back story, feel free to read my personal blog.

--

But to address the technical specifics of your post:

Sitefinity does not require it's own dedicated machine.  Several teams have live web sites running (right now) on shared hosting (Verio & DiscountASP.net).  However, DiscountASP.net caps these shared hosting accounts at 200MB and Sitefinity's Admin UI is exceeding those limits.  This results in recycling issues; which then cause login issues.  These issues are currently being investigated.

With regard to several Sitefinity instances running in a virtual machine;  it will work fine but memory limits still apply. As mentioned above, Sitefinity instances can consume more than 200MB per web site.  In my experience, these virtual machines are often memory limited (your virtual machine OS is also using your memory allocation) and it's difficult to stack too many web sites on these virtual machines.

--

The last thing we wanted to do was handicap GiveCamp teams.  I'm not happy with the lost productivity or that teams were subjected to these issues.

However, there were workarounds.  Several teams compensated, through the weekend, by running the dev. web site & database on their local machine.  They were then able to deploy these web sites at the conclusion of the weekend.  This prevented these issues from being a hindrance during the event.   This is also a solution I intend to promote heavily in the future.  Bandwidth at these events is always scarce and reliance on remote resources perpetually proves to be problematic during development.

In any event, I apologize again for these issues.  We're working hard to resolve all reported issues.

Gabe Sumner
Evangelist
Telerik | Sitefinity CMS

Dear Gabe

Thanks for the feedback. Unfortunately - the comment about exceeding 200 MB is a big issue. My ISP for example limits to 100 MB on Shared hosting. This would mean for any SBE I would need to get a VServer which of cours adds more to the cost in addition to SF.

I sure hope that you guys will be able to optimize SF Admin UI so all us small buisness, shared hosting client developers will not be standing in the rain.

Markus

Is this bug at least being worked on as a very high priority bug?  Even if a site was fully developed on a devs machine locally then put onto shared hosting, if that site ever had to get edited or added to by the client once the company designing the site was done, they would run into the same exact issues we are seeing now.  That is not a viable solution at all.  I can't even create a simple form on sitefinity 4.0 using discountasp.net without it hitting the 200mb limit and kicking me out every 5 minutes.  Its extremely frustrating and time consuming.  My clients are extreamly frustrated and so are my developers. Not to mention file uploads, page creation, user creation, etc.

Having the same issue with a DiscountASP hosted site.  Just wanted to subscribe to the thread.

As far is being logged out every 15-20 minutes... that sounds luxurious, we are being logged out about every 5 minutes.

Dan Finney
317-816-9353 x1
www.BoxCrush.com

Sitefinity Web Design | Marketing | Branding

BoxCrush®
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
No Borders. No Boundaries.
No Boxes.

Sitefinity Service Partner

Markus:  Unfortunately - the comment about exceeding 200 MB is a big issue. My ISP for example limits to 100 MB on Shared hosting. This would mean for any SBE I would need to get a VServer which of cours adds more to the cost in addition to SF.

Hey Markus, I'll ask the team but I doubt we'll ever aim to fully support 100MB.  There might be opportunities to disable parts of the CMS, but 100MB is really restrictive.  Given the availability of low-cost shared hosting plans with more memory, I would have trouble making an argument that 100MB is worth aiming for.  That's my $0.02.

What are your thoughts?

Michael: Is this bug at least being worked on as a very high priority bug?

Very high priority, yes.  This is roughly divided into 2 challenges.  1) Getting Sitefinity to run in a smaller memory footprint.  2) Preventing Sitefinity from losing track of the logins when an application recycle is forced due to memory allocation.  

Both issues are being actively investigated.  We hope to release a patch in the coming weeks.

Gabe Sumner
Telerik | Sitefinity CMS 

Does this memory issue affect the live site at all, or only the admin side?  Will site-visitors experience any problem with a Sitefinity 4x site hosted on DiscountASP?

Here is the official word from DiscountASP. I was a little surprised that they were not more helpful as they are a Sitefinity Hosting Partner.


-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Hello,

Thank you for contacting DiscountASP.NET.

The reason why you are being signed-out of your application is because your application pool is recycling due to the 200 MB memory limit that we have in place on our Windows Server 2008/IIS 7 servers to maintain overall system performance.

One of the most common workarounds to maintain session information is to enable and then use SQL Server Session State Management and for some more information, please review the following DiscountASP.NET Knowledge Base article:

support.discountasp.net/.../how-to-enable-aspnet-sql-server-session-on-your-web.aspx

It would be best to contact the software vendor first just to verify that there won't be any conflicts or issues with the installation of the schema.

If you decide that you'd like to proceed, please confirm the name of the database that you would like to have the SQL Server Session State Management schema installed on.

Thank you,

Joseph

DiscountASP.NET is a Microsoft Gold Partner
Team Foundation Server Hosting | ASP.NET Web Hosting

blog.discountasp.net | dasptv.com | community.discountasp.net| labs.discountasp.net

Stay up to date! Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/discountasp or become a fan on Facebook: facebook.com/DiscountASPNET

Its not discountasp's problem.  Its a clear bug/problem with sitefinity 4.0.  They are aware of it and we can only hope for a fix soon.  From what i've seen over the last 2 months on discount asp, the app pool doesn't affect front end users, the only thing they'd see is a possible slowness if the app pool is recycled while they are browsing and they have to refresh the page. 

danfinney,

How can DiscountASP be more helpful?

It's as if Toyota made a car that was way too wide to drive on a normal street, and then complaining that the city isn't more helpful about the problem.

I understand that it is not DiscountASP's problem to fix and I am not entirely sure what they could do to be "more helpful."  I was hoping for an interim workaround or an out-of-the-box solution.  Please pardon my open speculation.

Hi,

We are indeed working with DiscountAsp.net on a solution. Unfortunately I cannot reveal more details on it. Of course, the issue in our domain. We are working on memory optimizations and already pinpointed some of the things that we will do in order to lower the memory footprint.

Once we are ready, we will provide a build and a note for it.

At the River City Give Camp in Richmond, VA a few days ago we decided to use Sitefinity 4.0 and DiscountASP.Net. We too ran into the login / logout problem and experienced many hours of wasted time. I'm going to recommend to the Southern Maryland Give Camp coming up in April 2011 that we do not use Sitefinity 4.0 until the bug is fixed. I hope you realize that you'll be losing sales if you don't fix this problem soon.

Derryl

We're experiencing the same problem of timeout running the production release of Sitefinity 4.0 at DiscountASP.net.  My users are now very fustrated with the stall that I am forwarding to them and are looking for delivery of a site they can use. Right now it is not supportable with the timeouts that are happening this this frequency. 

Can we get a timeframe when this will be finally addressed? Thanks,

David

We're working to address this with the SP1 release, which is planned for late February.  As of this writing, this is all the information I have available.

Gabe Sumner
Telerik | Sitefinity CMS

Hi all

I just wanted to join in and state that this is a huge problem.
I currently use 3essentials.com as my hosting provider and I am quite statisfied.
The default plan they have allows only for 50 MB application pool RAM, the business plan allows for 100 MB application pool RAM.
The price for additional RAM is $10.95 /mo per 100MB.

Certainly there are other hosting companies that might give more memory by default, there are others that don't even state anything. But I guess that buying additional RAM would be in about the same price range which is really expensive.

Currently I'm on hold with new projects, until this issue is solved.

Jörg

Gabe,

What Memory Limit do we currently need to have available to avoid this issue?

Keep in mind that as Telerik works to fit Sitefinity into a smaller memory footprint, custom code still has the potential to put an application over a host's memory limits.

Any update on this issue? Telerik was suppossed to release the service pack today....

Dear Larry

I must correct you the SP is due this week

Sitefinity 4 Service Pack 1 - due in the week of February 21

And even if it was today its only morning in alaska and hawaii now :-) So they would still have some time.

Markus

Any update on this? My version of Sitefinity crashes very often... It's very unstable... and I really need this update...

We developed a new website using Sitefinity and deployed it in our test server but it keeps crashing very often... For some reason, SQL Server keeps going down...

Please let us know when can we expect this fix... I guess Feb 21 is already over in majority of this world...

Dear Jason

I understand your frustration, however

Sitefinity 4 Service Pack 1 - due in the week of February 21

Everybody seems to be missing the part where it says "due in the week of"

Busines Week will end on Friday. Depending on your country the week will end on Sturday or Sonday.

So patient for just a little more.

Telerik delivers usually delivers more than we expect. So cut them some slack and if the SP1 is not out on Sunday tell them nicely on Monday.

I am in the same boat, only that I am waiting for Q1. It's kind of X-mas as a kid. Its allway 365 days between them but on December 14th it just seems further away when waiting for the new red bike.

Markus

Some wisdom: by the time a man realizes his father was right, he probably has a son thinking he is wrong.

IMO if discountasp.net wants to be a recommended SF host, THEY should up their app pool limit, not force telerik to burn tons of cycles trying to shoehorn it in.

We could have had more features or bug fixes, but instead they're having to fix this...bah

I'd bet they get a significant amount SF business just for telerik promoting them as preferred.

Hey everyone,

Based on what I'm seeing it looks unlikely that Sitefinity 4.0 SP1 will fully address the timeout / recycle issues on DiscountASP.net shared hosting.  The team made some progress, but not enough to get Sitefinity 4.0 to run comfortably in this environment.  We'll continue to make additional optimizations and still aim to support this environment.  However, it seems unlikely this will happen before the Q1 2011 release.

In the short-term though, we're actively looking for additional hosting providers that offer environments that already support Sitefinity 4.0.  Earlier today, I finished testing Sitefinity 4.0 on Arvixe's shared hosting and it ran fine:

http://www.arvixe.com/

I believe we're in the midst of making them an official Sitefinity hosting partner.  In any event, my point is that there are some affordable solutions available.  We'll work to find even more and welcome other recommendations as well.

P.S.- SP1 will probably hit early next week.  

Gabe Sumner
Telerik | Sitefinity CMS

If requested, would telerik please consider extending the liceses of our affected clients by a few months? Our clients signed up with dcasp.net based on Ts recommendation as them being a certified host, and that recommendation was passed along by us as developers who are implimenting a cms we (again) recommended. Some perhaps paid for a full year in advance (ouch) So now were looking at pissed off customers who are unable to reliably edit content in a content management system, and are paying monthly for that. Let me also reiterate that i belive this is 100% a DiscountAsp.net problem, however if you paid x thousands of dollars for a car that only drove for 2 minutes before breaking down, you'd go back to the dealer who sold you on the car(I'm tired, but I think that makes sense. Also on an awesome note...you can post to the forums now on the iPad...sweet. **edit** I'm going to remove the love for the iPad posting and turn it into a bug report as it seems to be ignoring my line breaks and so this is one gigantic paragraph. I know it turns the radeditor into a plain text box for gimpy safari, but I see the line breaks when I go back into edit mode so it should be able to render them as HTML breaks I'd imagine...

Gabe,

Thank you for letting us know about it. But Sitefinity 4.0 has lot of other issues... At this point, the production applications are not stable... The application we developed at the GiveCamp is running into severe issues even though it's deployed on dedicated server and it's the ONLY application deployed in the IIS.

If you want to know more about it, my GiveCamp Team Lead can send you the details.

This happens mostly when the users are uploading Videos/Pictures or making changes to the backend and it brings the whole site down... When we log into the server to investigate, we find that SQL Server is down... It's crashed.. The only way to recover from it is to re-start the server. We were hoping that this issue will be fixed in the due to be released SP1. 

Also, at the GiveCamp, we created four new Charity Starter kits on this server and all the teams connected to the database on this server during development. Initially, it ran well for 15 mins... After that all 4 applications crashed... This is a brand new VM with 2GB of Ram. We were not in a position to develop with Sitefinity. Unfortunately, 3 teams bailed out and used other Open Source .NET CMS. We struck with Sitefinity but soon after we took the site live, we started getting complaints from our Charity group that the site is down... It was very painful for us to get a call from them and not knowing what to say. We had to give our server details to the charity group so that they could restart the server every time the site is down. We are hoping to get this issue resolved with the soon to be released SP1.

At this point, it's costing me $35 per month. I bought the dedicated server monthly package and deployed the application so that our charity group can use it until Sitefinity is in a position to be deployed to Shared Hosting. But it's not the only issue... We also need to know why it's crashing often and what can we do to prevent it. And if Sitefinity team is going to provide the fix.

Thanks once again.

@Steve, I disagree with you on this one. I don't think this is at all DiscountASP's problem. It should be Telerik that tells DiscountASP what the required memory footprint should be (and tells us as developers as well) and it should be Telerik that approves their services as "certified".

I know eventually SF 4 will be one of the best CMS's on the market, but right now I think they've set a new high when it comes to over promising and under delivering. There are so many bugs, so many missing features (that were promised or just plain removed from the previous version with no notice) and as many are finding out, it does less out of the box than SF 3 and yet it uses way more memory. Yes I realize there's a new foundation under the hood, but so far I've found that building custom modules on this new foundation takes 20x longer or in some cases isn't possible yet. I've launched one site using SF 4 but am putting all future SF sites on hold for at least another 6 months when I think they'll finally be at what I would call RC quality, I expect final release quality at the end of the year.

Cheers,
Phill

@Phill

I am looking forward to the Q1 release very much. Because some of the missing features, shared content for example, are simply very important.

At the moment I am not realy developing but just testing SF and reporting bugs or ideas how I think it could be better. This will pay off but I agree that it is frustrating working with a product that simply is not yet in a really finished state.

But I have known Telerik to make every efford to fix that all. We are just 6 month early using it.

Markus

@Gabe

I just would like to comment on your recommendation of www.arvixe.com

I was hosting SF 3 with my swiss hoster for the past years, and was always happy. Because of the increased demand on RAM and also because 4.0 does not have the ability to save files on the server I had to look for another hoster.

Having hosted for 10 years in Switzerland I was really not fond of looking for a hoster overseas but gave www.arvixe.com a try anyhow.

I installed 4.0 on a PersonalClass ASP PRO. I must say that I have just used it for testing SF so far. No real development or custom experience (waiting for Q1).

But what I want to say is that www.arvixe.com has a great service. To me one of the big advantages is that they have 24/7 support. The PersonalClass have a 250 MB cap for App_pool and the BusinessClass even 500 MB.

https://support.arvixe.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/138/0/imposed-memory-limit-in-windows-servers


After testing the PrivatPlan ASP Pro and the support services for about 1 month I even decided to get my own VPS Class Server. It is amazing what you can do at www.arvixe.com.

So I could definitely recommend www.arvixe.com and why not give it a try. Try a PersonalClass ASP Pro for about 1 month (will cost you 11 $)  and you will find out immediately if it suits you and the price is simply great.

Anyone who wants to know more about my experiences can drop me a mail at mb (at) marktold.com

Markus

@Phil That's fine, I disagree with myself all the time :) But what you described is discount asp.net problem. Telerik (and us) have told them the requirements for 4, but they refuse to change the limit...so I guess no future sf business is more imoprtant to them

I still disagree. If DiscountASP won't change, that's their choice. But Telerik totally has the ability and responsibility to remove them from the list of supported Hosting Partners. Why are they on this page http://www.sitefinity.com/partners.aspx if they don't provide the minimum requirements? At the very least there should be a large * that they support SF 3 only.

More so, I think it's crucial that a page like this http://www.sitefinity.com/documentation/installation-and-administration-guide/installing-sitefinity/system-requirements.aspx  state just how much memory is required by the application. Telerik knows this is an issue and yet doesn't make the information easily available. They'd rather you spend time developing, purchase a license and then find out the memory requirements when you go live! 

I just think they're being irresponsible on a number of fronts here.

Phill

@Phil

Thank you for saying everything i've wanted to say but in a much nicer way.  I've been dealing with this problem since before i even started this thread.

@everyone else.   Telerik never mentioned this requirement and still doesn't.  As far as discount.asp goes they offer a lot for the small prices that they charge vs any other hosting provider out there that is on the same level as them.  They are one of the only shared hosting providers that allow full trust(another SF 4.0 must) and 200 mb app pool.  Its in their name, DISCOUNT, if they allowed more memory for the app pool then they would have to charge higher prices, and then they wouldn't be much of a discount anymore.  Telerik seems to be finally admitting that their cms is using too much memory, even though its extreamly disappointing to hear that it won't be fixed in the SP1.  This product should have never gone live the way it stand right now, they would have been better off pushing the launch date and delivering a quality, stable, robust product then rushing it out the door.

@Phil
 
Yes, I agree, we are arguing the same point :)  DCasp shouldnt HAVE to change, but if they want the business they SHOULD change...however it's teleriks responsibility to remove them from the preferred list and IMO compensate those devs\clients who've recommended our clients USE discountasp.net.  So clients are out money, and we look bad.

Hello guys,

We've removed DiscountASP.net from our hosting partners listings. We are aiming to return them with the Q1 release. 

Team Telerik,

Are we going to have SP1 update this week or not?

Team Telerik,

Are we going to have SP1 update this week or not?

@Larry
  I was under the assumption today or tomorrow (by the posts), but this is just SP1, not Q1 to fix this issue

@Georgi
Q1 2011 is a month away, so we've got customers paying for 3-4 months of hosting service with an unusable editor (albeit awesome when it works).  Can there be some internal talks please about extending the licenses for affected users please?

We like DiscountASP.net and plan on continuing with reliable service. What we are changing after all the Sitefinity problems encountered, delays, and incomplete development is to switch to MojoPortal, a free C# open source CMS platform rather than switch providers.  Sorry, Sitefinity 4.0 does not live up to past quality and as of today have stopped all development or testing of 4.0.  The problems reported here were known back in December and the product was released regardless.  Good luck your your testing and updates. We'll take a look again next year when the platform has been proven stable.

@David

I respect your decision, although I'm sorry for the conclusion.  By the time next year arrives I have no doubt we'll surpass inspection.  Thanks for giving us a look.

@Steve

Please email sales@sitefinity.com to ask your question.  Issues pertaining to licensing can't really be addressed by those of us involved in the forums.

Gabe Sumner
Telerik | Sitefinity CMS

@Gabe

This thread has been sleeping quite a while and now that Sitefinity 4.1 I wonder was the status on the memory consuption is.
I've been looking around the Sitefinity homepage to find out the official requirements. After some digging (they are hard to find) I found the official Telerik statement:

NOTE 1: Memory Consumption: Sitefinity 4 requires 500 MB to operate.

Did I read correctly?
In this thread we were talking about bringing the consuption down to 100 MB so that hosting on a reasonable provider would be possible.
Now it's a official 500 MB?

Could you please comment on this Gabe? I find this very frustrating, confusing and disappointing. 500 MB of memory you usually won't find on any shared hosting provider.

Regards
Jörg

Hi Jörg, 

This memory requirement was added because it is the current reality.  Sitefinity 4.1 requires around 500 MB of memory to run comfortably.

--

However, we're not happy with this requirement.  During Q2 (this cycle) we have budgeted time for optimization.  This optimization applies to performance & memory consumption.  This will also happen during Q3.  Our goal is to reduce this requirement.  I have no idea how much progress will be made during the next few weeks though.

By the way, 100MB is probably unlikely.  I would personally be happy with 200MB.  This would enable Sitefinity to run on DiscountASP.net.  However, these are just my personal opinions.  Time will tell what the team is able to achieve.

--

This is all I know on this subject.  Let me know if you have questions.

Gabe Sumner
Telerik | Sitefinity CMS

@all
Many of us have had to move sites. I am very happy with Teleriks recommandation www.arvixe.com and have even moved to a VPS.

Maybe some of you could make a calculation if a VPS 1,5 GB RAM for 60 USD / Month if splitted into 3 clients could be an option. If you have smaller site, I would assume that you could put more then 3 clients on the same VPS server since I expect SF to be RAM comsuming especially when working on it (back-end) and not when simply surfed at.

@Gabe
It sure would be nice if Telerik gets it down to under 250 MB. I personally since having more then enough RAM and speed hardware wise would defenitely appreciate it if the backend would get a whole lot faster. I know that we have gotten inpationt over the years with faster connections. But the amount of traffic genearated still seem to be very big for comon task.

Thanks for the work and efford.

Looking forward to 4.2 :-)

Markus

Hi Gabe

Of course I'm not happy to hear this, on the other hand we know now what we are up to.
But please make sure, that this issue get's the required attention, because I think this could several problems:

For example if this requirements stays at it is, then you can drop the community and small business editions from your portfolio, because the hosting would simply be too expensive. 
There is simply no shared hosting around that offers 500 MB of dedicated RAM in it's base offering. The hoster I currently use offers additional RAM for 10$ a 100 MB per Month. So if the end customer is doing the hosting himself he would pay 40$ extra per month or around 500$ a year.
The other alternative would be that I will offer the hosting for my customer, which leads me to a Virtual Private Server as Markus uses. Because I want to earn some money too, the monthly cost would be 30$ a month which is a cool deal for a third of a dedicated virtual server. --> But still, it would sum up to around 350-400$ a year.

So the cost of hosting the new Sitefinity would be a minimum of 350$ or probably even more. Depending on the hosting company you choose. Nothing a smaller business would be willing or able to pay.
The end conclusion is (in my view) that the market for smaller sites is out of reach for Telerik (and me as well).

The next problem arises (at least for me) with my existing Sitefinity customers that are such small business customers as I mentioned. There is no way that I can upgrade them, as I would have to tell them, that the hosting will now cost 4 times more, as it did before with SF 3.7.
The next conclusion is then, to drop the Sitefinity maintenance, as they are not able/willing to upgrade their sites.

So the current situation is difficult for me as a business man. If I'm honest with my customers (and yes, I will be honest) I currently can't recommend SF 4.1 for smaller shops, except they are willing to pay the additional hosting costs that are required. For larger customers, this is not an issue, especially if they go with the big editions of SF 4.x.

Currently I'm wondering how much of these memory ressources are needed for features that are not accessible to the professional and lower editions? Do you know where the memory is used or what is causing this?

Regards
Joerg

@Markus

Don't forget that the OS and SQL Server (if on the same system) will need some memory too, so the 1.5 GB won't be enough for 3 clients. 2 clients would be the maximum if you follow strictly the recommendations of Telerik.

Gruess
Jörg

You know, it is funny how developers miss the forest by looking too closely at the trees.  I've been a web developer since HTML 1.0, and have seen this issue a few times.

The memory problem with the admin control panel is mostly likely that Telerik tried to make it too fancy.  AJAX can be very expensive for resources on all sides.  To buy that sense of 'local GUI' experience for the user in a website very expensive.  If you try to do it for everything -- as SF 4.0 seems to do -- it costs you.  For example, I've written a library that implements powerful forums, and I found that it was best to restrict AJAX to only the message editing, and nothing else.  The site ends up being faster and having less load on the server.

If you really want a very slick editing interface, you should probably implement it in WPF as a client and only send a web service request when the user elects to 'save changes'.  This would be a fully asynchronous model vs. AJAX which tries to defeat the asynchronous model of HTTP by making it appear to be synchronous.

Short of a proper WPF & WCF implementation for the admin functions of Sitefinity, I'd suggest that much of it be implemented as pure ASP.NET with simple forms.  It is faster and sufficient for most things you need to do.  I get annoyed at how long AJAXified pages that do simple things take to load and save, when I know the regular form approach would be at least twice as fast.  When you consider it forces more memory on the server, then it goes from annoying to a potential deal breaker.

Advice to Telerik -- unAJAX every page in the admin panel that does not need it.  Only the most complicated editing should have it.  Even those places that do (like page layout editing), can avoid the back and forth to the server with proper design.

Brian, I respectfully 1000% disagree...

Are you talking about MSAjax?  There's none of that going on here with sitefinity, it's all real PURE ajax\json requests with a WCF backend.  So where MSAjax and webforms posts everything (viewstate and all) back to the server, SF4 is just sending back a few k of JSON (if that).  I highly doubt 500M is eaten up by session data in the due to a "fancy" backend.  Also OpenAccess L2 Cache wasn't even enabled until now so it couldn't be that either...

Do you remember 3.x?...that was all webforms and postbacks and my god was it painful at times.  What CMS uses a dedicated windows client to manage data...that just defeats a whole ton of the benefits of web.  Ever had to get an administrator to install something..let alone upgrade it.  So with SF4 using WCF you can go right ahead and implement your own client to interface with the CMS if you'd like, but I don't want any telerik resources allocated to that...I really fail to see how a WCF client would be any faster than a browser sending a few bytes of JSON.  Chrome with SF4 is already lightning fast. 

The memory usage comes most likely from the assemblies that have to be loaded which includes the Telerik.Web.UI which I think they pegged early on as a potential cause.

There are webhosts who don't care how much memory you use, you just need to look\ask.  I use www.canadianwebhosting.com/ for my site and they just dont care...when we got it running they were willing to configure absolutely anything I asked them to even on a root IIS level.

@Steve I have to 1001% disagree with you, and agree with Brian. I really think Telerik went overboard here with ajaxifying everything. I'm no expert but my philosophy is "keep it simple", get your logic working (bug free, which SF4 is far from) with simple page post backs. Then your bugs out of the way and slowly add ajax to improve the user experience one area at a time and only where it's actually beneficial.

A great example of how the ajax overkill went too far is how complex it is now to create a custom module with a page selector or a image selector. Do you remember how simple that was in 3.7? Now even telerik can't provide a Product module with these features, I think it's even too complicated for them!!

Whether or not the ajaxifying of everything is the cause of the massive memory footprint I don't know, but I can say that right now SF 4 provides the exact same features to my clients that SF 3.x did and it's using more than 5 times the memory and is much much slower on both the back end and front end. Along with bug fixes I hope some major optimizations come soon, and way before they start adding new functionality again. 

1. Fix Bugs
2. Improve Performance
3. Fix Bugs
4. Add new Features
5. Fix new bugs
6. etc. etc.

That should be the process going forward.

just my 2 cents (yet again)

Cheers,
Phill

Disagreed.

Yesterday I showed my website to my boss and he was impressed by 4.0. The ClientSide binding is something really great. No more post backs with 4.0. We have 2 ASP.NET Developers that found it very easily to work with the controls and new model. They shared with me that 3.x was far away from what 4.0 offers.

@Phill

It would be

1. Fix bugs
2. Fix bugs
3. Fix bugs
4. Improve usability (Any true/false should not be typed)
5. Improve Performance
6. Fix bugs
7. Improve usabilty
8. Add missing (not new) features
do this twice, and then

Add new features.

Just simply working with an 4.1 out of the box fresh installation is a pain in the neck sometimes. To me everything basic takes longer then in 3.7. So much stuff is simply not really finished. Navigation and anything where you have to input text like true/false. I am clueless why these are not pulldowns or radiobuttons.

So before I realy want to see new features I would love to have 4.1 simply working (workflow, roles, reordering pages, renaming page groups and so on)

After that make it really easy usable for those who dont use the fluent API but want to do most of the sutff in SF Admin.

After that bring e-commerce, newsletter and anything they like.

Markus

@Phill,
  But the underlying framework is webservices, that's the future of the web.  Sending SMALL bits of JSON back and forth, not the lazier approach of MSAjax by artificially posting back html and viewstate...

There are bugs, things are complex, but fundamentally it's a significantly better framework.  Now maybe they need to spend some time and improve the dev experience for us...but it's 100% not "ajax" that's eating memory.

@Steve, ok maybe it's not the ajax but they've done two things with this new "amazing" framework. They've made it much more complicated to add advanced modules w/ selectors and performance is abysmal. I'm running 2 simple SF 4 sites on a quad core box w/ 8GB of RAM (and only one other static html site) and load times on both front end and backend are far worse than anything I've seen in SF 3.x or any other CMS for that matter. It's really hard to get a client excited about all these new features when you spend most of your time in a demo waiting for for the "loading..." graphic to go away. (isn't the idea behind ajax that you load just a bit here and there and the overall experience is like a desktop app? well that's not happening w/ SF 4).

So ajax or not, there are some serious bug fixing and performance enhancements required.

Phill

@Phill
...agree to disagree then :)  WCF was the way to go, who knows how much longer webforms will even be a thing...MS is heavily pushing MVC right now.  Everything is moving to jQuery and client binding via services.

Are you perhaps running the sites with full tracing in debug mode when you demo?...I'm getting great speed on our live site which is just a 2k8 VM with 2 Gigs of RAM, and it's also running the bloaty community server.

So ajax or not, there are some serious bug fixing and performance enhancements required.
...agreed

I'm really sorry to hear that stuff from the beta is still not fixed in 4.1.  Rather than losing customers, why not bring back 3.7 as an option until the current version is ready for production release. It's not a good thing to get your developer community to start hating working with it - they have much more influence than you know and could get the product tossed out rather easily.

We spent a lot of time looking and working with 4.0 production release and with all the problems and list of incompletes, we decided to go with another CMS for the interm. It looks like our revisiting "next year" sounds like we'll be reviewing the product again in 2 years at the pace these problems seem to be resolved.

@Phil: I definitely have to disagree with you concerning performance. With the 4.1 version I'm seeing an average of 50-60% increase in page load time both for frontend and backend pages, which was really impressing for clients who've been using 4.0 for a while. Like Steve mentioned maybe you should check the debug flags in your web.config, that's the first thing coming to my mind right now. 
David, like someone mentioned earlier in this post, 4.0 is far superior to 3.x, as it gives you much more control and relies on a powerful model, I wouldn't compare them at all. From the viewpoint of a person who has delivered 90% of my projects based on the 3.x version, I think the Telerik guys did a great job with 4.0. Yes, some issues were definitely introduced with 4.1, but I myself met adequate support on most of them and am eager to see the fixes in the SP.

@Ibrahim

My biggest concern is performance of the front end. At the moment my site transmitts about 700 kb on first call (without HTML, CSS, Images) and I have debug set to false.

Any tips to bring that down is appreciated.

Markus

I agree with Markus, an near empty page sends almost 1mb to the client, call me crazy but that's excessive. The backend isn't speedy but the more important area for performance is the front end.

@Ibrahim, in case it wasn't clear I was comparing 4.0/4.1 performance to 3.7 performance, not 4.0 to 4.1. There's a big difference in time spent waiting for tasks to complete, I think the little loading bar graphic is getting burnt into my screen (and yes, debug flags are set to false).

Cheers,
Phill

@Phill

Answer from Support
We're aware of this problem and we're working on a more global solution. With the upcomming service pack there are some improvements related to the amount of javascript files that are loaded. The script even now are minifed and combined in order to improve performance.

The backend transfers a ton of data to, but there you can say well you need a fast connection. But Front End. That really needs to be worked on. I started to look for every style in my custom Panelbar and TabStrip CSS to see which styles are not used and trow them out. But that saves about 10 kb max.

But if you have to fight against 700 KB thats simply a drop of water on a hot stone.

----------
Some improvments could be made if the navigation would use for horizontal and vertical RadMenu instead of once RadMenu and  once RadStrip. This would save another 5-10 kb because if both used you would only need one skin file (also less work to style)

Other then this. I sure hope the SP1 will make a huge improvment in this area. Please Telerik if you work on something else then bug fixes - make the page load faster for the client.

Regards Markus

PS: Waiting patiently to SP1 and all the fixed to come.

@Telerik

Your current web page (www.telerik.com) uses Sitefinity 3.x.
Did you already update to 4.x? I think it would be time to eat your own dogfood.
Maybe then the problems would dissapear quickly. :-)
Any plans on that?

Regards
Jörg


From Wikipedia:
Eating your own dog food, also called dogfooding, is when a company (usually, a software company) uses the products that it makes

Yeah!  Javascript is a big thing right now it seems

(If you use Google PageSpeed to analyze performance)

1) 212k can be saved by minifying Telerik.Web.UI.WebResource.axd (I'm assuming this is done based on what markus said).  If you enable the CDN, the MSAjax scripts will come from ajax.microsoft.com and that cuts the combined script down significantly removing 50k.. 

2) TON of javascript loading in PageLoad causing some blocking mostly from the Telerik.Web.UI.WebResource.axd.  I'm not seeing much jQuery in the scripts either...wouldn't that be more efficient than MSAjax?

3) This is a beef I've had a long time with the RadControls which they just don't seem to care about...they don't minify ANYTHING in the resource file that gets downloaded.  Every single skin comes through perfectly whitespace formatted.  The claim is that they don't want to break cross-browser functionality, however there's plenty of minifiers which respect those rules, and at the very least remove the whitespace....LINK

@Jörg

That is a very dumb idea what you are asking (sorry)

a) it will take away resources some where :-)
b) some stuff might not be working anymore

How about

1) Never fix something that is not broken
2) Never change a winning horse
3) Never change a running system

So please let Telerik do their work. They know where they are comming up short and are adressing the issues. Slowly but steady.

Wait for SP1 and see how much is fixed.

Markus

I just finished a bunch of tests, and I have no idea where the empty pages topping 700k are coming from.  On an almost complete theme, we're not seeing anywhere near that.

For example: http://sf4.ocfp.machealth.ca/communications (dev site)

Total Page size: 300k, only 11.5k cached.
With logged in Browse\Edit on: 450k, 14k cached.
...and I haven't even minified\combined the CSS yet.

The only page near 700 is the Home page which is due to rotator images.

The only thing I can think of why you're pagesizes are large\slow are
1) IIS Dynamic\Static compression isn't on...It's gotta be GZip not being enabled...the JS can go from 800k to 200k with that enabled.
2) Still in debug mode
3) IIS Expires headers not set

@Steve

Even if you are right that GZip would not be on in some cases it's still a lot of data beeing transfered.

I created an empty page with one of the standard templates.

- No graphic
- no extra CSS

Page is about 6 KB

Rest 212 KB - So there seems to be a lot of overhead that is not needed on first sight.

..............................
Checked my VPS and found out that dynamic compression was not installed. I was fooled because the grayed out checkbox was ticket. Just saw the alert that it was not installed later.

Now empty page is 3 KB
Rest is 62 KB which is still a lot for nothing

Here is a link on how to install dynamic compression: http://www.iis.net/ConfigReference/system.webServer/httpCompression/dynamicTypes

-----------
Anyhow I do not know if people with shared hosting can do this so easely. VPS is really a nice thing to have.

Markus

The 200 would be the Telerik.WEb.UI and yeah, there's no way around that...sitefinity team has zero control over that...aside from maybe pushing them to bloody minify their CSS in the released assembly

Guys,

Is there a way to have the actual website running on a hosting company's server but have the Admin side
on a personal server that has internet link. Just wondering if i can split things up given this massive amount of memory
requirement.

So one way out would be if I could host the admin side and have the public (front) end on some hosting company's server. Is that possible?

Many thanks,
Andrei

Is there a way to have the actual website running on a hosting company's server but have the Admin side

That's known as decoupling the editing environment from the production server.  This isn't a scenario Sitefinity has formal support for.

Although, in theory, you could have 2 servers that both reference the same database:

Production Server -> Production database
Dev. Server -> Production database

All content changes could be done on the dev. server and then inherited from the production server.

On the production server, the Admin portion of Sitefinity could simply be avoided (not used).  I don't believe the memory usage starts to accelerate until the Sitefinity admin is actually loaded.

--

This might work fine, although it could potentially be extremely slow on the Dev. Server.  Sitefinity is relatively chatty with the database when assembling pages & content.  If the database server is on a remote network then load times could easily sky-rocket.  

Give it a try and report your results.

Gabe Sumner
Telerik | Sitefinity CMS

@Gabe
Also any .config changes would need to be uploaded to the main site server...

Guys,

We are a charity that relies on donations to run. 500+MB may cost us a bit on hosting. I know a few recommendations have been made here about hosting Sitefinity but if there are new recommendations or good experiences then please share them. i am looking for a hosting provider that is cheap and good.

Many thanks,
Andrei

I'm trying out the hosted demo and got a session expired 30 minutes into figuring out if this is an OK product for end users.  The browser is hung at the error message attached no matter what I click or how often.  I'll have to use task manager to kill the browser.  I don't think this product is ready for prime time. 

Hello Terry,

You can go to /Administration/Settings/Advanced . From there expand Security node and scroll down to
BackendUsersSessionTimout. By default we set this time to about 2 hours. You can try to increase the value, but if you keep getting this error this means that something at your end clears the user session and cookie which invalidates the user and it is considered as not authenticated for the current request.

Regards,
Ivan Dimitrov
the Telerik team

Any update as to whether 4.2 corrects the memory leaks?  Is it usable yet on DiscountASP.net?

--Kdc

Not to my knowledge, unfortunately.
If you look at http://www.sitefinity.com/devnet/4-2/known-issues.aspx you see that it requires 500+ MB of memory which is something you never get on any shared hoster.

The conclusion I draw is that Sitefinity is only for "high end" sites that will run on a private virtual server or similar. For normal customers its basically a no go.
To my surprise Telerik doesn't seem to consider this a big enough issue to tackle. If there are technical reasons why this cannot be changed I would like to know about these technical details. But there is no information only that it seems to be considered an issue.

Jörg

@Jörg Well that's not totally accurate...I run my site on shared hosting and don't have a 500M limit at all...so you just need to find one that does.  DiscountAsp.net might be a bit different since they host so many sites they need to keep everyone under control....it's cheap....but it's cheap.

@Kevin It's not a memory leak as much as that's what the framework takes to run...(atm)

@Steve
Yes, this is true and I don't expect to get a good hosting for 5$ or less. I have looked at different hosters and their offerings and I you go for a reseller plan the limit is usually between 100 to 200 MB. If your app pool grows larger, it will simply recycle the pool and and any work you did in the backend will be lost.

If you don't go for a reseller plan, some hosters even allow more memory, but in the end it's still a kind of Russian Roulette.

Jörg

https://support.arvixe.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/138/4/imposed-memory-limit-in-windows-servers

500 MB Business Class ASP http://www.arvixe.com/asp_net_business_web_hosting

Starting at 27$ for 6 Domains or 40 $ per month for unlimited

I went with http://www.arvixe.com/windows_vps_hosting this.

Support is good and I have met the owner here in Switzerland.

I was afraid to host in the US first since I am Switzerland based, but found that I get more power for less money and the good thing is I get 24/7 support included. With any hoster in Switzeland outside of business hours, don't even talk about weekends you need costy SLAs.

And to be quite honest - internet connections now addays are very fast and by the amount of KB transfered for using SF it does not mather if you have 100 ms lag on requests in my opinion.

My two cents on this.

Markus

Hello all,

I just want to follow up on your posts in this thread.

1) We have fixed all known memory leaks in Sitefinity. The major one being how media items were being served when requested. Steve here is correct - 500 MB does not mean that we have memory leaks. Please note that here we take the highest memory usage that was observed during our performance tests. On average a Sitefinity 4.2 site serves 26 per second with OpenAccess second level cache, output cache and browser cache disabled. The tests were done with 100 concurrent users browsing the site with no delay between requests. During this test average memory usage was ~220 MB. The higher amounts of memory use are coming when there is an intensive use of the administration section (not frontend browsing).

2) Please take a look at this blog post: FormsAuthentication, HttpModules, Machinekey, application pool recycling, encryption benchmarks, and the 'Remember me' checkbox. Loosing the login session during an application pool recycle on shared hosting is not something isolated to Sitefinity. The problem is that most shared hosting providers have configured the environment so that each website uses an autogenerated machine key, one of the reasons for this is security - you do not want all of your websites to use the same machine key for decrypting ViewState, authentication cookies, etc. However since the machine key is auto generated when the website is recycled the site will not be able to process the authentication cookie stored before the restart. To overcome this problem, please provide a machine key in your web.config file.

Kind regards,
Radoslav Georgiev
the Telerik team

Brian,

If the remote admin does not work (whatever the reason), one can use VS 2010 to reach the admin connecting to the remote database. (There are free versions that should work OK)

This is what I do, as updating the site remotely on DiscountASP is simply out of question. What I do not understand is why using the remote db is so SLOW.

I am running VS on a i7 with 8 gig of memory. When the db is local, it is a breeze.And I have a decent Internet connection. Thus having a smart client may NOT solve the problem, though I believe it is a GREAT suggestion.

Very annoying.

I was not aware that Sitefinity had some issues with DiscountASP, which I recommended highly as it worked quite well with version 3.7. Below is an email I am sending to DiscountASP on the issues of using the back end with Sitefinity 4.2

Thanks, Tony

Hi Jerome,

Can you please try setting machineKey in your web.config? This will make sure that that you do not get the validating viewstate mac error. You can generate machine key settings using this online tool.

Regards,
Radoslav Georgiev
the Telerik team

Thanks, Radoslav,

I will give it a try shortly.

Regards.

I made the recommended change... what a difference!

What I am not sure about is what DiscountASP changed on their side, if anything. 

A great advice. Thank you.

500 MB?

That would be *nice*.  We are currently pre-launch and our dev server (IIS7) is hovering around 700-800MB during *resting* state.  Just this morning we've seen it peak at 2GB while two (2) content publishers were using it.

Would love for a Sitefinity contact to use our site as a performance testing playground, because we have over 5000 unique URLs (dynamic and static) and I think represents a "large scale" site, running SF 4.2 Professional.

Chris.

Hello Hrc,

Can you give us a little bit overview on your project and testing environment? What customizations you have over the system, how are you performing the test, what is the stress load?

All the best,
Radoslav Georgiev
the Telerik team

The time outs have been going on since beta. It appears telerick and Sitefinity have not recognized that this is a major problem. Its been ongoing for almost a year and the problem still has not been solved to the expections of their customers. We went with another brand but I still have hopes that they will come back around. But on this revisit to see if they solved their problems I am rather disappointed that they still have not fixed the major bottleneck in their product.  To quote Sondhiem, "...well, maybe, next year." 

Hi Everyone,

Unfortunately I found this post after spending two days trying to get some Sitefinity 4.2 sites working on Arvixe.  As I understand this problem is yet to be resolved can I please ask for some guidance.  My specific issue was probably intensified because I was using the Reseller plan (100MB Memory), I am reasonoably happy with Arvixe and want to continue to use them so would like advice on success with either the personal (250MB Memory plan) or must I absolutely go for the business (500MB) plan.

It would be helpful if this issue were also highlighted in some of the posts that recommend Arvixe, maybe something as simple as "Reseller plans have proven usuitable for Sitefinity 4, however Personal/Business have proven suitable and reliable".

Thsi would resolve some of the frustration toward the product and to be fair, with the SQL DB inclusions (via SQL 200 Express) Arvixe larger plans are still reasonably good value.

Thanks in advance.
Darren

Dear Darren

http://www.sitefinity.com/documentation/installation-and-administration-guide/installing-sitefinity/system-requirements.aspx

States that SF needs 500+ RAM to run. I have been hosting with Arvixe now for some time and am very happy. In order to get out of trouble I orderd a VPS. When looking at my taskmanager the sites seldom use more then 250 MB (forgeting the times when I have spikes going over 1 GB)

Don't forget that SQL Server is using MB as well so I would not take a risk. If you can not afford a VPS then at least go for the 500 MB business plan.

Maybe some on the forum can tell you how well SF runs on Arvixe Business plan.

Markus

Hi Darren

I also did go with an Arvixe account (with the 500 MB) but this is not a reseller plan.
However I think it is very important to create a fixed "machineKey" as Rodoslav pointed out in some of his posts.

Jörg

Yeah, it is a bit of a shame that not only the price of the software has gone up, but the hardware to run it as well. It is like a double-punch. I guess that is what happens when you demand loads and loads of features. However, will this 500MB RAM requirement ever come down or is that it?

The separation of DEV / PROD environment is something we do without much problem. We ONLY edit content in a DEV environment, and then we only deploy new binaries and a database backup.That works, is not pretty, but works.
It should be very nice to have somehting that automate this a little, something we might want to explore ourselves.

Anyway, we are experiencing memory leaks in our Sitefinity web site, and that causes us many problems. We are hosting our sites in our on-premise datacenters, but those Sitefinity web sites are VERY MEMORY HUNGRY. They consume up to 1.5Gb of RAM, and when this memory use approaches less than 20% free physical memory free the site stops responding and we have to recycle manually.
We have setup scheduled recycles at every night, but sometimes the sites crashes because they consume all available memory before reaching the recycle time window.
We have tried to setup automatic recycle with some memory limits, but when this happens the site takes too long to load and we have a couple minutes (or more) of downtime every couple hours, so we cannot allow that to happen.

Any recommendations on how to configure Sitefinity and/or IIS (and Worker AppPool) to smooth things out? We are having serious SLA issues with this, it is affecting our business very seriously.

Thanks,
Andres.

Hi Andres,

Thank you for expression your concerns about the performance of your website. Can you please open up a ticket in regards with this problem and share a little bit more information about your project. Any custom code that you have, how are your pages configured to use caching and have you made any modifications in terms of setting static content expiration headers in IIS. We will look at your configurations and if needed help you run some stress and load tests on the site to determine what is causing the increased memory usage.

Greetings,
Radoslav Georgiev
the Telerik team

Thanks, I have created support ticket #486773 http://www.sitefinity.com/account/support-tickets/view-ticket.aspx?threadid=486773

Please let me know what do you need to help us identify the cause of this and apply any corrective action.

Andrés.

Hi Andres:

If you have success with your ticket, could you please post your results back here so what we can be notified of the soution?

Thanks!

Terry

We have been using the Arvixe business plan with SF 4.x (recently upgraded to 4.3) and are very disappointed with the performance. We have tons of timeouts on the backend (specially when updating shared content). They also never mention on their site that the SQL server version that you get is SQL server express ( they simply mention SQL Server 2008). Based on our experience the bottleneck seems to be the database which is not surprising given that Arvixe runs SQL on the same box as the web front end instead of having a completely separate SQL server box.
Based on our experience I certainly cannot recommend Arvixe to anyone.

Does this mean that SiteFinity will no longer cause app pool recycles on DiscountASP.Net?

READ THE FIRST POSTING!  This problem has been going on since 2010. If Telerik has not fixed this problem after all this time it will not be fixed with the architecture. Get over it or look at other platforms like DotNetNuke or other FREE content management systems like mojoPortal written in C# and gives the source code with it! Maybe its time to vote with your feet.

Hugo, I run mojoPortal at Arvixe and do not have those problems. It must be Sitefinity's issue.