Hi everyone,

It wasn't too long ago that I started a project that involved building a website on DNN. This was to be a fairly complex web application and we figured DNN would be a good starting point.

Now it's finally getting close to time for launch, and my client had a load test performed on the site to see if it would scale / handle users.

Unfortunately, although the site seems to scale well, it performed very slowly. My client is very upset and I'm starting get worried / thinking about whether it was a good idea to use DNN in the first place. It seems that DNN comes with a lot of extra built in functionality that we don't need and that may be costing us in terms of performance.

I'd like to know what everyones best recommendations are for speeding up DNN and what features can we disable that would give us the performance boost we are looking for?

For example, can we disable the logging completely? The localization is another feature we don't need that might be costing us in terms of performance too...

Any other ideas? Thanks in advance...

1) What version are you using, If you are not using 4.4.0 then I would suggest upgrading.  Version 4.4.0 was strictly a performance improvement release and really does speed DNN up.  Not only does it have a number of performance improvements, but it also has built in compression and whitespace filtering, which can also improve the performance of DNN (although these feature might make some modules not work as expected and you should test out the functionality of you web site if you turn these features on).

2) Find a monitoring company or a scheduling application that lets you call web stie URL's.  Have it hit the KeepAlive.aspx page and this will eliminate the dealy the first time the user accesses the site.

3) Although DNN has built in compression, there are a number of 3rd party modules that do compression plus other features.  I have not used it but hear that PageBlaster is a great product. Of course, if you do use a 3rd party you would want to disable the features mentioned in #1 above.