We host hundreds of websites for public and private schools around the country and have received a LOT of complaints about how slow our sites are, which seems to be a typical and unfortunate byproduct of having DNN websites...well not any more!

After being put on the line by one of our largest customers, we sought the help of a 3rd party company call PowerDNN (www.powerdnn.com), and were on the verge of losing this large customer because of 10-15 second page-load times! 

First, we purchased their website/database optimizer (http://www.snowcovered.com/Snowcovered2/Default.aspx?tabid=242&PackageID=6837), which more than tripled the performance of our site!   We now have most pages loading in 1-2 seconds on average!  See our site for yourself at www.glynn.k12.ga.us.

Their optimizer restructured our database from a size of over 2GB down to 97Mb, which resulted in lightening fast pages!

We also had another site that was even larger, with almost 70 child sites, that was becoming a maintenance nightmare as well as moving WAAAAY too slow.  So, for only $50.00 a month, we were able to park our website on PowerDNN's shared servers, and not only saw an immediate and tremendous performance improvement, but also a huge reduction in our time trying to constantly figure out the many problems we were having with the site.   On top of all that, their incredible 24 hour technical support staff was extremely knowledgeable and competent, and were immediately able to resolve all the problems we were having with our site, and even some problems that we didn't even realize we had!

I don't work for PowerDNN (I own SchoolDesk at www.schooldesk.net), nor do I have any connection with their company, but I just feel that I owe the DNN community the huge favor of sharing the secret to fast and stable DNN websites, and where to find all the professional-level technical support you need to provide a great reliable service for yourselves and your customers.   As a hosting company that was actively searching for a new CMS because of the many problems I had with DNN, I now know that all the problems and performance issues can be fixed...you just have to know who to turn too. 

My hat is off to PowerDNN for saving my websites, my reputation and my company.   They are the secret to suceeding with DNN!

Database optimisations typically rely on new/altered indexes to improve query performance. These typically increase the size of a database a little. To see your database size reduced so radically, it suggests that the scripts mostly cleared out entries in the sitelog and eventlog tables. Entries are added to the sitelog table for each page request, so if it has grown large it can take longer than normal to write these. Entries are written to the eventlog table for system events, and again if it is large this slows down the portal. In normal practice dotnetnuke's scheduler would keep both these tables at reasonable size, so i'd suggest their your existing setup wasn't working correctly for some reason. You can manually fix this by running the following 2 commands via Host->Sql.

TRUNCATE TABLE eventlog

TRUNCATE TABLE sitelog

I'm glad your sites are now working better, but I suspect your issues were more to do with your initial host not doing an optimal job, rather than anything else, there are many thousands of dotnetnuke sites with sub-second response time.

Cathal

Confirmed (about the website being down)

What Cathal says is true. To add to this, recently I had problems with performance with the home page of pretty much all my sites. I had prevously subscribed to a website polling service (every good ASP.NET website should have one), but for some reason it did not work even though we could it touching the website in the logs. We decided to install a polling service on one of our servers which polled the site every 5 mins, and have never looked back ever since. Next job is to get rid of those pesky tables on our sites. We had tried third party compression but decided it made little difference to what was supplied in DNN core as standard. Right now we are VERY happy.