Every year, we have high school teachers come in to learn how to create a webpage for some summer research they do at our university.  This year, I decided to set them up with DotNetNuke--no more having to ftp their files in, learn an html editor, etc.  (obviously, everyone here knows why people switch to dnn)

After setting up their usernames and pages, I had them all log in and go to Add a new page.  The server went from being decently responsive to NILL.  In fact, trying to restart IIS ended up with the application manager locking up and needing a reboot.  When it came back up, the pages (tabs) were a MESS!  Looking at the list of pages, they're all over the place.  The heirachy is all messed up--none of the menus display properly, although the page settings show the proper parents.

I ended up deleting all of the affected pages from the Tabs table in the DB, as well as the modules that were listed for those pages.  I'm going to recreate them, and hopefully this time it won't go FUBAR.

So, my question is: How many people is considered "too many" for DNN?  This is running on a Windows 2003 server, dual 3ghz pentium-D (a little old, but not too bad), 3gb of ram, and the files are stored on a raided 10k rpm array.

The app pool is set standard--500mb max virtual memory, 192mb max used memory, throttled to 90%.  I had caching turned off, as I have found that when trying to make large amounts of changes, it can get screwy.  Am I just trying to throw too much at it?

Any tips for performance would be greatly appreciated.

Lance,

Thanks for the reply.  Yes, I had them all on the same portal.  I created a username and a page for each of them, giving them page editor control over their own pages.  It turns out, once I turned off AJAX and turned caching on, things got better.  However, turning on caching leads to its own problems when they update modules and the changes don't show up for a few minutes...  Very annoying.

The biggest problem now seems to be that pages don't stay where they're supposed to.  If someone creates a page under their own name, it can show up ANYWHERE on the page menu.  I've deleted a subpage and had the ENTIRE tree disappear into the recycling bin.  Errors like these have pretty much ensured that next year I'll be switching back to having them FTP their sites onto the server after working on them in an HTML editor.  I have spent more time in the past week sorting through the page menus trying to correct the page orders and discover the missing pages than I'd ever care to again.

The weird part is: the pages still correctly show the path when you visit them.  It'll show /Program/2008//TeachersName/Page.aspx, but be under some entirely different spot on the page list.  It seems like there's some soft of issue when multiple people add and manipulate pages in a short amount of time.

And what's with caching working so shoddily?  Updating pages should trigger something that invalidates the current cache.  I shouldn't have to make a trade off between speed and old content showing for the next 15 minutes.  And even that's not consistent!  If I refresh the page multiple times, I get three or four different versions before DNN finally decides to serve up the correct version.  It's bad enough for someone who knows what to expect to have to go through it.  But to have people who aren't very savvy getting such oddness... Many of them have switched to making their pages on GooglePages and I'm just linking to it.

Sorry for the rant--you should see my inbox full of emails from these rather unhappy teachers.  Can't wait to see DNN5--I can only hope it cleans a bunch of these problems up.

-Andrew

FYI: there will be multiple caching enhancements in DNN 4.8.5, though I cannot guess the performance implications for your use case.