Start-up performance degradation after 6.2 migration

After 6.0 to 6.2 migration we are experiencing a significant extension in the "first hit" start-up time for a Sitefinity project.

The website is running on a dedicated Windows Server 2012 Virtual Machine with a single CPU core.  CPU is maxed at 100% for approximately 3-5 minutes upon first hit to the project's home page.  RAM utilization has acceptable breathing room (2GB assigned.)  Do not have exact statistics but noticeably longer than when running on 6.0.

Are others experiencing/noticing this lengthened increase in launch time for this particular migration path/release?

Any advice in streamlining/optimizing project for quicker start up times?

To mitigate user perception of the delay we are utilizing a ping service to repeatedly hit the site every 10 minutes to keep the site in IIS memory.  However, realtime web.config or AppCode changes are somewhat painful.

Thanks in advance for any acknowledgement and/or suggestions,

-Troy

 Hi, apart from the performance degradation after upgrading from 6.1.4610 to 6.2, we experienced broken inline page edit functionality. We have postponed upgrade to 6.2 upwards, until bugs have been corrected. We are staying on 6.1.4610, which we experience to be unusually stable and delivering a high performance environment.
rgds/Gunnar

I'm experiencing this significant performance degradation as well. I've upgraded from 6.1 to the latest 6.2. 

When the application starts it uses maximum cpu for at least 3 minutes before anything is visible in the browser.

I've been trying to profile the startup proces using red gate's profiler but this seems to be too much for my develop machine. As far as I can see in the profiler, the majority of CPU time is spend on Thread.Sleep? 

I'm also seeing 2 Visual C# Commandline Compiler processes which eat about 25% cpu while starting the application.

I do not have any production sites running 6.2 yet, but I am seeing this same behavior on both sites that I upgraded from 6.1 to 6.2 and on newly created sites in 6.2.  My CPU will max out to 100% as well.  

Hello,

There is indeed a performance issues in sitefinity startup that is present in sitefinity 6.2 its due to a pre compilation of razor templates which fires several compilers that utilize a lot of the CPU on the server.
We are working to resolve the issue for the next release, I will update this thread once an update for the fix is available.

Regards,
Stanislav Velikov
Telerik

Is there a way to downgrade from 6.2 to 6.14610. We are experiencing a significant degradation on a newly built site.

Hi Stanislav - i see 6.3 has just been released, did a fix for this make it into the release?

I too want to know if it has been fixed! Thanks

Hi, we sincerely hoped for a performance boost in the new 6.3.5000 release of Sitefinity. Unfortenately we have to lay down facts upon that this has not happened. I did not even bother upgrading to the 6.3.5000 release, but rather started off with a clean install of the new release. The loading times are not acceptable and I can still hear the loud fans starting to go on high-spin when all compilers start off converting the razor templates. Even after login succeded and I can see the backend dashboard, all screens are a LOT slower than the 6.1.4610 development environment I am using, which we still experience to be unusually stable and delivering a high performance development environment.

This is really sad, as we can not upgrade to a product that does not perform as expected over an older version.

The development environent is based upon a Dell Alienware m18x R2 with Intel Quad core i7 CPU at 3GHz+ using 32GB RAM, The fastest Intel SSD drives available on 2.2TB RAID0 to achieve the best performance possible (Have not tested the SAMSUNG 840 EVO TLC 1TB yet).

The O/S is Windows 7 Ultimate and database is MS SQL Server 2008 R2 on the same machine. 

Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate is great to work with and performance is blazing fast with Sitefinity 6.1.4600 and hundreds of webpages.

I still hope that the next version will fulfill our expectations on performance and functionality.


rgds/Gunnar

Hello,

The issue still remains in sitefintiy 6.3 release, the precompilation that utilizes the CPU is still occurring at site startup. For the next release we are working to provide the templates in precompiled templates assembly to avoid this overhead of precompiling them at startup. This is not a final decision and based on the decisions made in development of the fix more suitable solution may get chosen.

Regards,
Stanislav Velikov
Telerik

Stanislov,

When do you plan on releasing the next update?  

Also, strangely enough we just did 2 upgrades of Sitefinity sites to v6.3.  One sees no performance hit. One does not.  Do you have any thoughts on that?

Thanks,

David

Hi David,

For now I can`t give a time frame on when the issue with the precompilation of razor template that results in high CPU utilization at site startup will be resolved, at the moment we are working on a fix that is to precompile the razor templates into separate assembly, this will resolve the templates without compilation at startup.

For the scenario where one of the sites doesn`t encounter performance hit: The precompilation occurs at every site restart, for the next release those templates will be served precompiled form assembly. I don`t see any reason that the precompilation will be skipped for one site as there is no such option implemented.

Regards,
Stanislav Velikov
Telerik

I have several live sites on one server with this problem.  It takes a very long time to start up! Hence, a fix as soon as possible would be highly appreciated.

Hi,

Our team is working on a fix for the performance degradation at startup, however currently the fix is not ready and once completed we will plan the most suitable way to distribute it.

Regards,
Stanislav Velikov
Telerik

Stanislav,

With all due respect, this issue is now very old and causing great problems with many of us.  The Sitefinity team has had over 2 months now to release a fix.  Please provide an immediate fix.

Thanks,

David

Dear David

A lot of us just make sure to keep the site warm.

a) enough RAM will prevent the app_pool from recycling
b) some of us use services that test if a site is online and working. this will in addition keep the site warm
c) if you have newer server IIS has keep the site warm features included.

I do appreciate Telerik to make the start up faster but just be keeping the sites warm the startup is never an issue on a production site.

Markus

In case it doesn't get pointed out, there is a new internal build just released (6.3.5013) that addresses this issue: 
Improved startup time - reducing the CPU time by 25% compared to 6.3 by removing the runtime compilation of the inline editing’s Razor templates at startup. Instead those templates are compiled build time.

I've tried it out, and it definitely is a big improvement! Thanks to Telerik for the fix - I can actually push ahead with some upgrades now... :)

Hi,

The fix for the performance issue was released today and is availble for applying over Sitefinity 6.3 site as Michael informed.

Regards,
Stanislav Velikov
Telerik