Sitefinity CMS Speed?

Hi everyone,

What suggestions may you have regarding improving the speed of a Sitefinity web site? I am developing a large web site, and speed continues to be an issue. The web site is not launched, and we have hardly any content on the site as of yet. The web build itself is very minimal. There are no background images used to increase download time, and the code is very clean. 

I am not familiar with networking structures, but could this be a server issue? Why is Sitefinity so slow? I must solve this problem immediately as it is not acceptable for launch. I know Sitefinity's showcase has web sites far more advance than the one I am working on, and it seems to run fine online. Does anyone have any recommendations about what I can do to improve my Sitefinity web site speed?

I appreciate your time and help,

Thank you.

Maria

John,

I'd be happy to help. There is some tweaking that can be done to improve speeds. First though, what kind of environment are you currently on? For any professional Sitefinity site with a steady amount of traffic, I typically suggest a VPS or Dedicated environment. If this is an enterprise level website, I would suggest something a bit more intensive - splitting the website and database into separate servers with their own resources (database server w/ at least 8gb of RAM).

Shared hosting can be a little unreliable at times (in my own experience). However, Arvixe seems to do a pretty good job maintaining performance with their Business ASP Class Pro accounts.

Here are some resources for improving performance:
http://www.sitefinity.com/blogs/josh-morales-blog/2012/12/19/sitefinity-optimization-checklist
http://www.sitefinity.com/documentation/documentationarticles/installation-and-administration-guide/tips-for-optimizing-performance

I would also suggest enabling Dynamic Content Compression on your server to enhance the speed of the site. This will suck up more resources, but if resources are not an issue - definitely something to try: http://blog.wassupy.com/2009/08/enabling-dynamic-http-compression-in.html

Hope this helps!

Thanks,

Chris

Hello,

@ Chris - thank you very much for providing Maria with your valuable input, and for the exemplary post which I'm sure many people will benefit from.

@ Maria - we just wanted to add to what Chris recommended a couple more things:
1. Can you please check if the minimum system requirements for running a Sitefinity instance are met? Please note that the 500+ MB free ram, for example relates to a single instance.

In addition can you check the load on the machine where your site is currently hosted - could it be that other sites or software consume the necessary resources?
Also is the site database located on the same server or it's hosted on a different one? If the latter please ensure the connection latency to that server is good.
last but not least, please verify your site's Output Cache and Client Cache settings - by default these are enabled, and we recommend keeping them enabled to achieve optimal performance.

Please do not hesitate to let us know if any issues persist, we'll be glad to assist you further.

All the best,
Boyan Barnev
the Telerik team