Sitefinity development / website is really slow

Hi everyone,

We've been developing a lot on Sitefinity lately. And, we've had lots of issues, but almost everyone of those has been solved and we're building really nice things now. But one problem is still not solved and that is the speed! Our developers are all complaining about the how slow their Sitefinity websites start / run and click.
We are all using fast laptops and servers for development, but no instance runs fast.
I'm using a new 2 x Xeon processor 8GB RAM server for development, running Windows server 2008 R2, SQL 2008 R2 Developer.
Here is the list of how long things usually take.
Click run in Visual Studio 25 - 50 seconds before i'm on the homepage of my Sitefinity site.
Time between clicks in the backend , varies from 4 to 20 seconds.

I've seen some messages about modules that have to be loaded, and perhaps can be disabled so that loading times can improve, but haven't seen instructions on how to do this.

Are there some instructions available or best practices on how to speed up development environments?

Best regards, Tevez

Nobody with some good tuning tips?

Try a different CMS? I hate to be so negative, but with 4.x performance and memory usage has been a problem since release. They claimed that 4.2 had big performance improvements but on a server/dev machine similar to yours I haven't noticed a difference.

Sitefinity is still one very slick CMS from a UI and feature point of view but in my estimation there's at least another 6 months of development and optimizations before performance is acceptable. If I could still purchase SF 3.x licenses I would be using that platform instead until the performance issues and bugs are worked out.

So sorry that doesn't give you any solutions but maybe helps you set your expectations.

Regards,
Phill

Hey Tevez,

Since nobody so far has responded with some actual tips I thought I'd have a go at it and explain my set-up.

1. First of all, try and avoid running it through VS2010 as much as you can and use IIS server instance.
Since you've got a server set up, you should be able to access it outside of VisualStudio and that's much faster.

If you don't believe me, try the following. Build your project in release mode (optimized/debug off etc) and run ctrl-F5 (without debugging). It fires up Sitefinity on localhost, login to the back with Firefox, Firebug enabled and netpanel on All and activated and click on pages.

Here, the sample project I have, is 13 requests with a total of 2.6Mb

Open Firefox, browse to the IIS instance adress (it's the exact same build, clear cache and recycle your pool if you want) With the firebug NET-panel open, click on pages again.

Through IIS, I'm hitting 12 requests with a total of 723Kb. That's almost 2Mb less traffic pooring down.

Where'd the rest go? I have no idea yet... surprised me aswell to be honest since it's the same build code.

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2. Optimize caching and compressing on your IIS server.
Do the usual optimization tricks, it won't help on initial request but subsequent calls it'll help tremendously.
If I hit refresh on that same page overview, I'm getting 710Kb cached with only the 'get Pages' and 'Get PagesService.svc?....' not being cached.

YSlow on Firefox gives me a grade A with a overall score of 92, so that should be about optimized as much as it can be on the BackEnd Pages overview.

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3. Now I feel like my ex-boss rambling but... "Where's your damn favicon.ico"
Sitefinity doesn't have one out of the box, but with each pageload fiddler will show you a nice red 404....
If I'm not mistaking a missing favicon takes 4 round trips before sending back the 404, even though it doesn't show up as a 404 or missing load on Firebug or Chrome tools.

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4. SQL Performance.
I've got SQL set to re-index and shrink on intervals. Not sure if that's much of a performance gain but shouldn't hurt. But the one thing that did definately help was a stupid SQL setting. In SQL Management Studio, right click the server and click on 'Processors'.

Apparantly near the bottom of that page is a checkbox 'Boost SQL Server priority'. Which either I hadn't flagged or it was off by default. 

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I'm no SQL Performance Ninja but when observing the Firebug NET-panel, it's very clear that the 'Get PageService.svc?...', is the main culprit for page loading delays.

So any further SQL server or WCF service optimization tricks are highly appreciated.

Jochem.

Hi
Why Sitefinity telling us that now runs Sitefinity 4.2 much faster. What are these server they run on and what is the rest of us do not know. We have been running Windows Server X, ISS and hosted websites for 14 years. And never has it been so slow and never have we spent so much RAM! What happens at Telerik?? We and our customers are dying of stress and fear every morning to work with SItefinity 4.2.

Peter

Oh my end through extensive front end test I do see the front end boost in 4.2.  I went from 1.5+- second page loads to now 140-500ms.

...this is with all the things Jochem recommends (also try disabling the service tracing, that helps a lot)

To me speed has picked up a lot on the front end  ONCE the page has been loaded for the first time and the pages are cached. The problem are pages with little traffice where the cache expires many times before the next customer comes.

I have 14-25 seconds!!! before my homepage shows the first time.

Markus

That's really a failing of the AppPool IIS shutting down\starting up, I'm not sure there's a whole lot that can be done about that.  Suggestions would be extending the timeout\shutdown period for the AppPool

ALSO!  Keep an eye our for when they re-release the Application Warmup Extension for some dumbass reason they totally REMOVED it.  However I still have the beta installed on a few of my IIS instances and it does indeed prevent the shutdown problems.

Dear Steve

I have 3 GB RAM for two small sites. I don't thinks the AppPool is recycling. I simply thing that SF is very very very slow on startup.

Markus

No no I don't think you understand...IIS by DEFAULT will shut down the app pool (w3wp process) after X period of inactivity (ie nobody has requested the site in X period of time).  Go to the properties of your AppPool in IIS and you can tweak those ranges.

You're talking about the server only allocating 500M of ram and that forces the app pool to recycle when it's hit.

Steve

Hey Markus,

Want me to take a look at those 14-25 seconds? Not that I can do anything about IIS settings on a hosting provider, but I've got a few days off left, bored to hell with already another thunderstorm and it's either spamming the Sitefinity forum, reading up on Windows WF or fiddling around...

Jochem.

Dear Jochem

Send me your phone number to mb @ marktold.com

Looking very much forward to some help. I call you.

Markus

PS: Are you allready through with beta testing the e-commerce module :-) That should give enough to work on.

@Markus 

Sent.
Just making sure everything gets in the next SP, we've been slacking in reporting issues :)

The performance of our site on SF 4.2 is painfully slow and it is even slowing down other processes on the whole server. This is not a problem on the backend pages only, but frontend also.

Is there a setting on the Sitefinity application to help with these performance issues?

Also, it's probably a long shot, but does anyone know if the performance of 4.3 is better than 4.2?

Thanks!

Do you have a live URL to inspect?  I don't have a site that takes more than a 1.4 seconds to finish loading....heck my personal site takes 15ms to return the HTML (on shared hosting).

Hi Steve,
It is not the frontend which is the big problem (once it is started up), but editing in backend and development of modules in VS. My PC/Virtual MS Windows 2008R2 with Sitefinity on a 3.4 Ghz Intel Core i7, 16GB of 133 MHz and it runs in my opinion much too slowly. Compared with, for example Umbraco, EPiServer and other CMS systems.

/Peter

@Peter, yes, it s quite frustrating and specially the fact that I haven't found any comments from Telerik on this so far.
In fact in my case the frontend pages are the issue as well, making the site almost impossible to navigate. This is not even a live site so the traffic is nearly zero... I wonder what will happen once it gets the expected thousands of visits.

@Steve, unfortunately the site is not live so I can't send you the link, but my pages are taking anything from 10 secs to 10 minutes to load, and some times I need to refresh 2 or 3 times to get something hapenning.

Thanks

@Pablo
  Are you running out of ram on the server perhaps?  To me a 10 seconds load sounds like is the apppool perhaps has recycled and is firing everything up again.

@Steve, that was also my suspicion but when I check the server, it looks pretty much OK. See attached.

@Pablo 
Just to be sure, edit the advanced settings of your sites AppPool and turn on the windows event logging of app pool recycling....then go crazy and see if any entries are generated?

@Steve,

I can't find any settings for logging on my App Pool. I am using IIS 6 by the way.

Thanks,

- Pablo

Hello everyone,

Most of the build time and the initial loading of the system is related to the huge size of the product. As you know Sitefinity has a number of modules that are not available for use depending on your license type. This is a great place for improvement since our lower-end editions can be optimized to have only modules they can utilize. 

The Sitefinity team is currently outlining the roadmap for its next major release in April which should be available soon. One of tasks that are likely to be part of the release is separation of modules in different assemblies which will allow us to load some of the heavy modules on demand. This will decrease both the time it takes VS to build and compile your project as well as the memory footprint at runtime.

Stay tuned for the latest updates to our roadmap in the upcoming weeks.

Somewhere I got caught up in this thread and I've seen all the comments fly by the past 2 days...

@Pablo,
Since your site isn't live and it's both BackEnd and FrontEnd, any chance you could share a screenshot of a Firebug NET panel or Fiddler?

That should give us an idea about the amount of requests, their statuscode/caching and should reveal any bottlenecks unless everything is ok but just 'slow' in which case we need to focus on server configuration and most likely Steve's on the right track as usual...


@Peter
One of the major points in version 4.3 release was it performance optimization. Database queries (front and back end) reduced by over 40%. Page load time on average decreased by 10% and CPU time by 25%. Those are impressive numbers, and even with those numbers it may be still relatively 'slow' compared to other cms systems, those numbers clearly warrant an upgrade to v4.3

Interesting to hear how you are developing since you're not experiencing any FrontEnd issues, almost sounds like you're using VisualStudio's integrated Webserver to develop on localhost...

Dear Histro

QUOTE
 This will increase both the time it takes VS to build and compile your project as well as the memory footprint at runtime.
UNQUOTE

Is the word increase correct. I thought it was tht goal to reduce the footprint???

Markus

Breaking it apart is what I have been wishing for a long time. And I hope it will be done sooner because the customers are not that happy with the speed and performance. I can't wait for that to happen, because the speed will be acceptable again. Version 4.3 is much better, but it is not there yet. With the license ending in August next year, and the target is April (+ 1 or 2 months delay), I hope that there is a big enough window to qualify for the broken down version. It would be wrong for the customer to have to pay so much more again for a bit more speed. I guess we will see, and I can't wait.

Andrei

@Jochem
The theoretical impressive figure is probably correct, but I just listen to what our customers are experiencing and they are not impressed.
Customers complain that it still takes too long just to edit a simple page and unfortunately I can not disagree!
And the lives of our servers have not been better, maybe it gets better in April ...?

@Hristo I will look forward to spring! :-)

/Peter

Hello everyone,

@Markus - corrected, thanks for the remark!

Am I to understand from Telerik that the major speed issues are from the fact that all the modules are bundled and have to load the first time, even if they are not used? And that it will be April (at least) before they are broken out?

We have terrible speed issues and are supposed to launch our site (http://beta.easterncurrents.ca) this weekend.   Sometimes pages are fast, but quite often the site hangs inexplicably and we have to recycle the app pool or restart IIS.  Then things work fine for a while, then just stop again.  Other Sitefinity 3.7 sites on the same server work fine (such as http://usa.weleda.com).

I just went to the beta site again (was there a few minute ago and other people are working on it as well) and it hung for 2 minutes, then it said:

The system is restarting...

Please wait a few seconds. You will be redirected automatically.

Hi Ben Alexandra,

 We are carefully looking through your issue, but can you please stick to the forum thread that you already have opened about it, as it would be easier for us to work through the whole information like that. Thanks for the understanding.