Hey all,

I'm a bit new to DNN, as in, i just installed my first one 2 weeks ago, and i'm working on updating, configging, and developing now.  But i'm having some major problems with the performance.   I'm buiding DNN into our Guild pages (http://beta.forceofretribution.com) and i'm trying to get it to perform alot faster.  i had issues before with it always trying to install a new version, or to reinstall (not sure if thats a latency/time out error thing) but it would always do that, and some idiot would undoubtedly hit 'install' and screw up my web.config. 

So, A couple problems...
1, i gotta remove teh install.aspx file. 
2.  Figure out why eveything is running so slow. 

I put it in it's own application group, and just from turning it on, the memory usage jumps to 50MB.  I haven't even used it yet..lol.  The database is only 12MB. 

How can i make this site run faster...  Thanks for your help

~Doc

Okay...  Here's what i've done.. 

1.  Set AutoUpgrade to False,   (That worked out great) .
2.  Set the keep alive service on it.  That also worked out great.  

Here's where i'm having some issues tho...

 - Where can i set the caching at?  I've looked in the application pool and the website properties in IIS.  Didn't find it.  
 - I have Visual Studio on my laptop, as every good developer probably does, and I'm wondering if i can compile the website, and just publish it out to the website, to keep the load times low.
 - Is there a huge performance hit when you use MSSQL05 vs. SQLExpress?  We're using SQLExpress, so, i'm not sure if moving it will make it work better. 

I think that will round out my newb questions for the day.  Thanks for getting back to me with advice, because once I get the hang of this, I can start developing for this platform. 

~Dan

couple of quick points

• make sure you have read/write permissions to the web.config file set. During install, the installationDate is written in there, and if the file is readonly then it can't write this node, and this can end up causing mulitple attempts at installation
• do not precompile dotnetnuke, at present it does not support it due to an issue with resource files - we are looking at supporting this use case, but it's not an easy fix
• sql express will scale identically to sql 2005 - it simply limits what it will do by limiting the amount of memory for queries to 1GB. This will support a fairly decent site - i recommend you do some perf testing to establish how much your site can handle
• as mentioned, there are settings such as caching and whitespace filtering under the host menu , some users also use the pageblaster module http://www.snapsis.com/OnlineStore/BrowseProducts/tabid/589/List/1/CategoryID/1/Level/a/Default.aspx to improve performance

Cathal