Sharepoint 2010 - How can I speed up the Site Performance?

Question

Are there any non-hardware related methods for increasing or optimizing the performance of a new Sharepoint 2010 Enterprise implementation?

There are over 1000 users that access this site and it can become sluggish. We have a VM with 16GB of RAM allocated with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 installed.

I have researched ways to improve the performance of the VM at the Host level but I was wondering if there are ways via central admin or any backend improvements that can possibly help speed up the performance.

Any type of advice or information is much appreciated!

Answer 1

A few things in addition to the tips in Mike's link:

• If this is a publishing site, you might look into enabling output caching
• For all sites, enabling BLOB Caching can help performance
• Change the full and incremental crawls of your search to only run off hours. I've seen places that re-indexed all content every 10 minutes and then wondered why the site was slow!
• Disable unused service applications as these can easily eat up RAM
• Reduce the number of Web Applications to the minimum that you need. Some places have all sorts of 'test' web applications out there and they all eat up memory

Beyond that, you are looking at hardware changes including adding additional servers to the farm, moving the SharePoint databases to a dedicated SQL instance (a best practice anyway)

Answer 2

Specifically on the VM side of things - if it's VMWare, ensure 'driver locked' memory is not taking up large chunks of memory, and check the ballooned memory on the VM. If it's high, a lot of memory is getting swapped to disk.

This was happening to us recently - and actually ended up in a drive failure in the SAN. If this happens, a lot of disk I/O occurs on the VMware esx hosts, as it tries to move data around to deal with the failed disk – and why performance became so poor.

Memory Ballooning reference: http://www.techish.net/windows/a-few-notes-on-guest-virtual-machine-memory-ballooning/

Answer 3

you have one VM with 1000 users? If that's the case, that's your issue. You need to scale out your farm to multiple servers. You can see some of Microsoft's recommended farm topologies here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263199(v=office.14).aspx

Also, I recently posted an article on SharePoint's performance in general. Check it out: http://davidlozzi.com/2013/01/16/my-users-dont-like-sharepoint-because-it-is-too-slow/.

Answer 4

Solution: I Migrated all Databases out of the shared SQL server into a dedicated Microsoft SQL Server setup per Microsoft's recommended specs (16 GB ram + 8 cores )

So now, I have my Sharepoint Server which has 16GB of Ram and I also have my dedicated Sharepoint SQL Server that has it's own 16 GB of ram and 8 Cores.

This has significantly improved overall performance.