Ok, I am 100% positive this topic has been brought up before and that there are existing threads.  With that said, I know and we all know that DotNetNuke is the slickest thing to come along for web development and content management since sliced bread.

However, I am still baffled as to the performance issues that I experience with DNN.  Up front, I will say that I run my own server and that is where all of my DNN sites reside (about 10 of them).  My server is a Windows Server 2003, Dual Xeon 2.66Mhz processor, 2GB RAM, plenty of HDD space, running from a 100Mbit connection, yet my performance still suffers... mainly when you go to site initially.  I even have a KeepAlive module running on the home page that is programmed to walk through the site every 10 minutes.  Sometimes, the site just hangs and I have to kill the w3wp.exe process on the server to kick start it.

Would anyone else who has had any success in dealing with issues in this area care to post any tips / tricks / point us to any additional threads we may be missing (without having to read a small book)?  Website uptime, as we all know, is critical!  We cannot have a website that is down, virtually ever.  It makes us ALL and technology that we are using look bad.

I guess I don't really even care if I have to load an HTML page initially just to display SOMETHING on the site when website visitors go to my site. I just want it to POP!  Let's get creative, pulling out any and all stops, implementing any "behind the scenes trickery" that we have to!

Anyone else?

 

Here's a good thread on improving performance:

http://forums.asp.net/thread/1235032.aspx

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I've had to move my sites over to a dedicated server myself. Sites run fine now. Shared hosting and virtual hosting cannot run DNN sites very well, and that's a shame. I just can't trust a DNN site where I cannot desktop in and troubleshoot things going wrong, especially upgrades.

As I stated in my other posts, easycgi is probably the worst as they are just venturing into DNN and realizing it's natural for the CPU to spike 100% upon initial app load, running file synch, installing modules, etc. They forced me to move, this just after I praised them for a great job setting me up.

The dev for catalook says DNN 4.3.X is much slower than 3.3.X due to 4 not caching properly. I've not noticed this...

I've run a DNN site with 1000 users now for over a year, and have not had any slow app start problems. It now runs better on our new server with sql 2005 and an upgrade to DNN 4.3.3.

As long as people are visiting your site all day it should only recycle every 29 hours by default. If you are having problems, there are issues somewhere...

I do agree though that performance is a MAJOR PROBLEM. Just take a look at how many stored procedures are run on every page load -- there are 100's and sometimes 1000's. Plus, add scheduling, and you have 1000's on top of that in a separate thread. File Synch will bring your server to a crawl sometimes, yet most admin and modules require files to be in synch (you cannot just disable this).

One way the devs could help performance is to use cache better -- like don't call sp's for every little permission check. Cache these in an array or something.

My 20 cents...

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Jason Honingford - Web & Software Developer
www.PortVista.com