This article will discuss performance issues affecting SharePoint 2007 or WSS 3.0 and what you can do to ensure that your setup is optimised according to the recommendations suggested by Microsoft for setting up a typical SharePoint farm. There are quite a number of factors which need to be considered when optimising SharePoint’s performance. Microsoft has produced additional resources which you can learn many new skills and this can be found here.
The recommendation for configuring SharePoint is to configure a farm consisting of 2 servers one server for the web-front end and another server for the database. We would suggest that you have 64bit hardware and Windows 2008 operating systems. Especially for the web-front end using Windows 2008 will give you best performance when you configure IIS 7 caching to optimise the performance of loading your site content. Using IIS 7 as the underlying structure for running the website will give you much better performance using the enhanced operating system. It is also important to ensure not to put too much network distance between these two servers. The recommendation is too ensure that the web-front end server doesn’t have more than 1ms network latency too the database server.
Another issue of important is for you to ensure that your SharePoint lists do not exceed 2000 items. If any of your lists do contain items with more than 2000 items the suggestion would be to split these list items into folders so that each folder contains no more than 2000 items. You can run a data-fix to iterate through all the list items in the list and generate a folder then physically move these list-items into the folder you generated.
The final suggestion is to ensure that all queries performed on lists throughout your SharePoint portal are completely optimised. The recommendation is the use of views to reduce the amount of data retrieved from lists and even making your queries more intelligent. Writing customised queries inside of Webparts to extract data from a particular folder inside a list will limit the number of items sequentially searched each time and will ensure that your SharePoint site performs quicker.
This is just a brief overview about what you can do with SharePoint to modify your environment to ensure the application performs as quickly as possible. If you would like to find out more information about how Click IT Solutions can assist you with your existing SharePoint solution and help to optimise this for you please contact us at (02) 9029 5194 to speak with one of our consultants. We have experience with performing upgrades, making modifications to the application, database changes and server deployment changes to ensure that you SharePoint system always efficiently optimised. You can also reach us via email at info@clickitsolutions.com.au.
