Sitefinity Application Pool Memory Requirements

When I first started reading about Sitefinity v. 5.1, I was under the impression that Sitefinity v. 5.1 would have extremely low memory requirements such that it could be run on most shared hosting providers.  In addition, it would be "lightweight and superfast".

However, when I go into the System Requirements for Sitefinity v. 5.1, they seem to have been unchanged.  I was expecting the requirements to go down to around 100 or 200 MB for an Application Pool (similar to most CMS systems out there) which would thereby support most shared hosting providers.  But the 500+ MB requirement continues to be a roadblock in support for most hosting providers including providers such as Arvixe (which is supposedly a preferred hosting provider).

Please advise when Sitefinity will return to the old low overhead memory requirement days of Sitefinity v. 3.7x.  When I run a Sitefinity v. 3.7x site on the same hosting provider, it is super speedy, however, when I run Sitefinity v. 5.x, it feels as slow as molasses and significantly slower than most other ASP.Net CMS systems available in the market.

Hello Samir,

Thank you for your feedback..

For the past couple of releases we have focused on optimizing the memory consumption of the Sitefinity application, which has indeed resulted in a much more optimized product compared to the initial releases. This optimization is still on focus for the upcoming releases however let me elaborate a little bit on what has been introduced so far and how you can take advantage of it.

Sitefinity consumes the largest amount of memory on start up - this is when the whole application initializes. This initialization is a process carried by any available modules in the system. With the introduction of our Modules management feature you can disable any modules you are not using, which would decrease the application start up memory load.

In addition to that, due to this initial start up garbage collector will allocate a larger amount of memory for Sitefinity, which is later not used as much but is still allocated for this application in your machine's memory management.

With the introduction of .NET 4.5 Microsoft have worked out a much easier way fro managing the GC settings. You can inquire with your hosting provider whether they offer High Density hosting, under which C acts much more "conservatively" allocating less excess memory for the application.

Kind regards,
Boyan Barnev
the Telerik team

Samir, we are feeling your pain too.  My client has 14 sites that have to run in a load balanced environment and I've seen our memory usage flatline out at almost 1GB of memory for each instance.  Luckily, we have some really beefy servers.  We are currently using Sitefinity 5.0.  After the next few projects, I will finally be able to upgrade the sites.  I look forward to seeing the drop in memory usage each instance uses.

@Brett,

  Set your App pool to run in 32-bit mode, performance will be better and you should see memory usage hover around 300-500 (tops)

 **EDIT** ...even pre 5.4 btw

Steve,

I thought I had done that to all of my sites but I double checked and some were not enabling 32 bit applications.  Thanks for pointing this out and reminding me.  Most are now running about 450-550 MB but that is still too large in my opinion.  Your point though did decrease my memory size though!  Thanks!!!!