I am running on a VM hosted by GeroDev. I'm not sure of the exact hardware configuration (not able to contact them right now), but I would assume each VM instance is running on at least a 4-way server class box (I think they use only newer Dells, so it's probably a dual core as well). GeroDev has guaranteed that my VM instance will only share the host server with up to 9 other VM instances, so that does not seem too imposing.
My VM instance has 1 CPU and 756 MB allocated to it. The VM is running on Windows Server 2003 Standard R2. I also have Diskeeper running to ensure that the disk is properly defragmented. I am also using a Web Garden setup in IIS for my thread pool. I have made the appropriate changes to my DNN installation to support this (based upon DNN documentation for web farms). My VM has only 1 web site (the DNN installation), and the DNN installation has only 1 portal. My DNN installation is pretty textbook - a few 3rd party modules, a few custom modules, not too many users right now.
The SQL Server 2005 database is running on a dedicated SQL Server at GeroDev, not on the VM. They have told me that both the VM host server and the SQL Server are running on the same 1Gb connection (as would be expected).
Are there some specific DNN settings that I should be checking in order to optimize performance? I'm getting multi-second (sometimes as long as 30!) response times in some situations, even after the initial worker thread load in IIS! What am I missing here? I'll be honest in saying that I have not dug too deep into the performance counters on the VM yet, but I wanted to see if anyone has any guidelines or suggestion first, as that can be a long process.
Thanks!
Brian