Sitecore Performance Enhancements

Question

We need our Sitecore web application to process 60-80 web requests per second. We are using Sitecore 7.0. We tried deploying server 1 of WebServer + 1, but it only processes 20-25 requests per second. The web server queues all other requests in memory. As the load increases, the memory becomes full. (We made all Sitecore performance improvements). We need 4X performance to achieve the goal :).

Is it possible to achieve this by upgrading an existing server, or do we need to add more web servers to the production environment.

Note. We also use Lucene indexing.

Answer 1

Here are some things you can consider without changing the overall deployment architecture.

CDN for offloading media and static resource requests

This allows the content delivery server to be available to handle important content requests and display logic.

Example www.cloudflare.com

Configure and use Sitecore Native Caching

This is from the manual:

Investigate and configure Sitecore caches in multiple tasks. Thus, each task is more focused and simplified. The focus is on setting up and configuring Sitecore Cache database files (prefetch, data, and item caches).

To configure output caching properties, the client must recognize both the Sitecore caching configuration link and the Sitecore presentation component. How to properly enable properties for the expiration of these caches.

View Sitecore Configuration Guide

Find slow queries or controls

It looks like your application follows the best practices of Sitecore, but I leave this note for those who can find this answer. Use Sitecore's built-in debugging mode to determine the slowest controls and sub-items. In addition, if you have Google Analytics installed, there is a Slow Pages report that can give you some information about where your application is slowing down.

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Speaking of which, if you are ready to provide additional servers and set up a load-balanced environment, read on.

• Separate content delivery and content management
  For me, the first logical step before load-balanced content delivery servers is to separate the content management from the equation. It's pretty simple, and the Scaling Guide allows you to customize HistoryEngine to update Lucene indexes.

• Configure load balancing with two or more content delivery servers
  After you have taken the first step, it can be as simple as cloning the content delivery server and adding it to the load balancing pool. There are a few things to consider here: Does your web application support logging in? Therefore, you will need to worry about sticky sessions or machine keys. Does your web application use file media instead of blob media? I did not have to deal with this, but I understand this is another consideration.

• Scale SQL Solution
  I saw applications with four load-balanced content delivery servers and SQL Server there were no problems - I think it will be unique for each case depending on many factors: the power and configuration of SQL Server, the content model of your application, the complexity of your queries, customization caching on content delivery servers, etc. Again, the Scaling Guide covers SQL mirroring and disabling, so this will be your first stop at this.

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Finally, I would say contact Sitecore. These guys probably saw more of what went right and what went wrong with the settings, and you could get the right path. Good luck

Answer 2

This answer is written from the perspective of a Sitecore developer:

Bottom line: you need to find out exactly where your bottleneck is. It will take some digging, but will be very useful. You can certainly serve 60-80 requests without problems / without any problems ... but, of course, this makes a lot of assumptions about the nature of your site and requests.

For my site, I found that the implementation of Sitecore caching is a sub-pair ... In my application, I created very simple and aggressive application-specific caches, and that made all the difference in the world. For example, we have 900+ "Partner" elements where advertisements of our sites are placed ... and just placing all these objects in an array in the Application object significantly accelerated the page request. Finding an object in a Hashtable indexed by its Item.Name or ID will be much faster than Sitecore.Context.Database.GetItem ("/ itempath") or calling SelectItems () (at least my experience). If your architecture and data set enable this strategy, we have had good experience.

Another thing you need to pay attention to is the visualization of XSLT. Personally, I completely avoid them in favor of ASP.NET UserControls. XSLT implementation is slow. Up to 10 times slower than native UserControl displaying the same HTML. Therefore, if you have several of them ... replace some custom code and you will see a world of differences.