Hi guys,,

I just completed my DNN 6 Site and set it up on the web. Now I would like to tweak it to be super fast. Can anyone give hints in point form of things I need to setup to make it fast. Please just the straight forward things I can do. Thanks

Super fast web sites tend to start with super fast hosting environments. So this is always the first place I would look for optimum performance - and these days this tends to mean scale-able cloud based hosting.

Moving past the hosting environment - the first and best out of the box option is Keep Alive or Always Up site monitoring for your hosting.

Asp.Net based systems by default work on a 20minute timeout for the application pool that hosts your site.  Basically what this means is that if your site is idle for more than 20minutes its application processing thread will be shut down.  When the next person visits your site - the application pool needs to be started again and this is something that can take a while depending on your hosting - 20-30 seconds in some cases.

To get around this asp.net requirement - many people utilize a keep alive or site monitoring service - this is a service that basically checks your site is running every 15mins or so - apart from being reporting services that can notify you if your web hosting is offline - they have the important side effect of preventing your application pool from shutting down after 20mins since every 15mins the site is effectively being woken up.

Next if your site is reasonably static - that is - it changes very little - you may want to look at increasing the site caching to high.  Sites that change a lot or have a lot of dynamic elements on each page tend to benefit less from this than sites with a lot of static content.

You may also want to look at consolidating your skin / container  style sheets into a single fill - and also possibly merging them with the portal.css file.

Also examine how well optimized your graphical elements/images etc are for web display - dont use large images that rely on the html scaling to reduce their size - and use jpeg elements with 60-65% compression where possible instead of png images.

Some food for thoughts.

Westa

Thanks a lot Wes, I'll take your points in to consideration. What of the actual Site Settings and Host Settings, is there nothing I need to tweak there such as disabling Users Online or enabling Compression?