Hi
We have built 2 web sites on MOSS 2007 which have many customizations on pages and many ajax web parts.
Currently one of the sites is live and the configuration is as follows
Web server
Xeon 4 core processor
12 GB RAM
50 GB harddisk
SQL Server
Xeon 4 core processor
16 GB RAM
150 GB disk space
Servers are deployed as virtual machines on VMWare.
The live site is in test and it is open to public users and there are 1000 unique users per day for the site.
The problem is, the site is too slow and we are planning to put 11 web sites on the same configuration one of which will be a very popular site which we plan that 10000-15000 unique visitors per day.
What may be the problem ? Is this configuration too low for the current site and how can we plan for a configuration for the future projects ?
If you are expecting more than 15k unique users please follow the Large farm topology for sharepoint Kindly find more details here Physical topology
Off course, following best practices and physical topoly is a sound procedure!
Howeever just saying your sites are slow isn't saying to much at all. Did you look at all the slowlyness reasons, try hit F12 in IE8 or IE9 and look for network time for instance. How is your code performing? Could there be any other cause for slowlyness? how did you configure your virtual network settings?
Looking at your Hardware rightnow, this looks certainly reasonable for its job. How did you
configure backend SQL Dbase, is it running on fiber, ISCSI (and if so on what kind?)
did you perform IO testing on both machines during a period of time? what are the outcomes of this?
just saying it's slow doesn't say anything without knowing more detail. start with F12 in Ie8 and go on from there , try and look for the things that waist time, be it code or hardware IO holding the performance down.
DID you know Microsoft isn't advising hyperthreading on server machines in combination with SharePoint!
Related
I've been researching this quite a bit and just wanted some professional opinions on this. I am working on an eCommerce site that is really slow for submitting orders. Would creating a web farm be beneficial? If not, what would - server, or network wise (load balancers, etc...)?
Assume the app is optimized as much as can be for now and we need to look at other alternatives.
Environment:
Windows 8 RC 2
IIS 7.5
SQL Server 2008
Ideas
IIS and database on separate server
Load balancers
Maybe we can find a cheaper solution.
If it is only the submit process which is slow perhaps you can just improve the code and use some background workers that won't block the main thread.
Otherwise what about just upgrading your server?
Static file compression.
Create separate application pools for static and dynamic pages with in the website.
Get the heavy feature onto a separate app pool. Check if that helps.
Do optimization on SQL server end. Indexing?
Other than this I would look in to the code. IIS performance is highly dependent upon the pages being executed.
You may also want to check from browser developers tool as to which part of the request is actually clocking the most amount of time. That will give you a better idea of which aspect of performance you should really be concerned about.
I tested Liferay on two different machines: One vserver with 1GB of RAM and the another with 3 GB of RAM. On the one with 1GB Liferay was very slow. On the second (3GB of RAM) it runs quite good.
My testing environments has just one organization/community and only one user (me). Imagine the situation I would build a portal for approx. 15 organizations and 400 users (30 users per organization) in total. Would a server with 3GB of RAM be enough to run quite fast?
This is very important question for me because of the financial aspect. I don't want to spend 200 Dollars per month for hosting. :-)
Thx.
It's more dependent on the number of concurrent users than on the number of users on the system.
IMHO Liferay runs slow on your 1GB server because most likely you didn't tune and run with the default memory settings - this will most likely cause swapping to step in, thus your suffering in performance.
Tipp: Download the performance whitepaper, read and understand the scenarios in there. Also, you can easily do the initial (rule of thumb) measurements on a local computer and see how much memory the JVM has to have in order to run smoothly. Especially in tight memory situations, you definitely want to fine tune your VM settings to match your hardware.
You'll find rough numbers and orders of magnitude in the performance whitepaper. See what best matches your usecases.
Remember that the same argument counts for your database and other components that you happen to have. With what I assume your sizing requirements to be (from the few details that you give) you should get Liferay to run on a server for well below 200$/month
Does anyone have an experience running clustered Tigase XMPP servers on Amazon's EC2, primarily I wish to know about anything that might trip me up that is non-obvious. (For example apparently running Ejabberd on EC2 can cause issues due to Mnesia.)
Or if you have any general advice to installing and running Tigase on Ubuntu.
Extra information:
The system I’m developing uses XMPP just to communicate (in near real-time) between a mobile app and the server(s).
The number of users will initially be small, but hopefully will grow. This is why the system needs to be scalable. Presumably for a just a few thousand users you wouldn’t need a cc1.4xlarge EC2 instance? (Otherwise this is going to be very expensive to run!)
I plan on using a MySQL database hosted in Amazon RDS for the XMPP server database.
I also plan on creating an external XMPP component written in Python, using SleekXMPP. It will be this external component that does all the ‘work’ of the server, as the application I’m making is quite different from instant messaging. For this part I have not worked out how to connect an external XMPP component written in Python to a Tigase server. The documentation seems to suggest that components are written specifically for Tigase - and not for a general XMPP server, using XEP-0114: Jabber Component Protocol, as I expected.
With this extra information, if you can think of anything else I should know about I’d be glad to know.
Thank you :)
I have lots of experience. I think there is a load of non-obvious problems. Like the only reliable instance to run application like Tigase is cc1.4xlarge. Others cause problems with CPU availability and this is just a lottery whether you are lucky enough to run your service on a server which is not busy with others people work.
Also you need an instance with the highest possible I/O to make sure it can cope with network traffic. The high I/O applies especially to database instance.
Not sure if this is obvious or not, but there is this problem with hostnames on EC2, every time you start instance the hostname changes and IP address changes. Tigase cluster is quite sensitive to hostnames. There is a way to force/change the hostname for the instance, so this might be a way around the problem.
Of course I am talking about a cluster for millions of online users and really high traffic 100k XMPP packets per second or more. Generally for large installation it is way cheaper and more efficient to have a dedicated servers.
Generally Tigase runs very well on Amazon EC2 but you really need the latest SVN code as it has lots of optimizations added especially after tests on the cloud. If you provide some more details about your service I may have some more suggestions.
More comments:
If it comes to costs, a dedicated server is always cheaper option for constantly running service. Unless you plan to switch servers on/off on hourly basis I would recommend going for some dedicated service. Costs are lower and performance is way more predictable.
However, if you really want/need to stick to Amazon EC2 let me give you some concrete numbers, below is a list of instances and how many online users the cluster was able to reliably handle:
5*cc1.4xlarge - 1mln 700k online users
1*c1.xlarge - 118k online users
2*c1.xlarge - 127k online users
2*m2.4xlarge (with 5GB RAM for Tigase) - 236k online users
2*m2.4xlarge (with 20GB RAM for Tigase) - 315k online users
5*m2.4xlarge (with 60GB RAM for Tigase) - 400k online users
5*m2.4xlarge (with 60GB RAM for Tigase) - 312k online users
5*m2.4xlarge (with 60GB RAM for Tigase) - 327k online users
5*m2.4xlarge (with 60GB RAM for Tigase) - 280k online users
A few more comments:
Why amount of memory matters that much? This is because CPU power is very unreliable and inconsistent on all but cc1.4xlarge instances. You have 8 virtual CPUs but if you look at the top command you often see one CPU is working and the rest is not. This insufficient CPU power leads to internal queues grow in the Tigase. When the CPU power is back Tigase can process waiting packets. The more memory Tigase has the more packets can be queued and it better handles CPU deficiencies.
Why there is 5*m2.4xlarge 4 times? This is because I repeated tests many times at different days and time of the day. As you can see depending on the time and date the system could handle different load. I guess this is because Tigase instance shared CPU power with some other services. If they were busy Tigase suffered from CPU under power.
That said I think with installation of up to 10k online users you should be fine. However, other factors like roster size greatly matter as they affect traffic, and load. Also if you have other elements which generate a significant traffic this will put load on your system.
In any case, without some tests it is impossible to tell how really your system behaves or whether it can handle the load.
And the last question regarding component:
Of course Tigase does support XEP-0114 and XEP-0225 for connecting external components. So this should not be a problem with components written in different languages. On the other hand I recommend using Tigase's API for writing component. They can be deployed either as internal Tigase components or as external components and this is transparent for the developer, you do not have to worry about this at development time. This is part of the API and framework.
Also, you can use all the goods from Tigase framework, scripting capabilities, monitoring, statistics, much easier development as you can easily deploy your code as internal component for tests.
You really do not have to worry about any XMPP specific stuff, you just fill body of processPacket(...) method and that's it.
There should be enough online documentation for all of this on the Tigase website.
Also, I would suggest reading about Python support for multi-threading and how it behaves under a very high load. It used to be not so great.
What various methods and technologies have you used to successfully address scalability and performance concerns of a website? I am an ASP.NET web developer exploring .NET remoting with WCF with SQL clustering and am curious as to what other approaches exist (such as the ‘cloud’). In which cases would you apply various approaches (for example method a for roughly x many ‘active’ users).
An example of what I mean, a myspace case study: http://highscalability.com/myspace-architecture
This is a very broad question making it difficult to answer, but I'll try and provide a few general suggestions.
1 - Unless you are doing some things seriously wrong then you'll likely not need to worry about perf or scale until you hit a significant amount of traffic (over 1 million page views a month).
2 - Your biggest performance problems initially are likely to be the page load times from other countries. Try the Gomez Instance Site Test to see the page load times from around the world, and use YSlow as a guide for optimizing.
3 - When you do start hitting performance problems it will first most likely be due to the database work. Use the SQL Server Profiler to examine your SQL traffic looking for long running queries to try optimizing, and also use dm_db_missing_index_details to look for indexes you should add.
4 - If your web servers start becoming the performance bottleneck, use a profiler to (such as the ANTS Profiler) to look for ways to optimize your web pages code.
5 - If your web servers are well optimized and still running too hot, look for more caching opportunities, but you're probably going to need to simply add more web servers.
6 - If your database is well optimized and still running too hot, then look at adding a distributed caching system. This probably won't happen until you're over 10 million page views a month.
7 - If your database is starting to get overwhelmed even with distributed caching, then look at a sharding architecture. This probably won't happen until you're over 100 million page views a month.
I've worked on a few sites that get millions/hits/month. Here are some basics:
Cache, cache, cache. Caching is one of the simplest and most effective ways to reduce load on your webserver and database. Cache page content, queries, expensive computation, anything that is I/O bound. Memcache is dead simple and effective.
Use multiple servers once you are maxed out. You can have multiple web servers and multiple database servers (with replication).
Reduce overall # of request to your webservers. This entails caching JS, CSS and images using expires headers. You can also move your static content to a CDN, which will speed up your user's experience.
Measure & benchmark. Run Nagios on your production machines and load test on your dev/qa server. You need to know when your server will catch on fire so you can prevent it.
I'd recommend reading Building Scalable Websites, it was written by one of the Flickr engineers and is a great reference.
Check out my blog post about scalability too, it has a lot of links to presentations about scaling with multiple languages and platforms:
http://www.ryandoherty.net/2008/07/13/unicorns-and-scalability/
There is velocity from MS as well as MEMCache has a port to .NET now and also indeXus.Net
Sharepoint isn't the speediest of server applications, and I've read about a few tips to speed it up. What steps do you think are necessary to increase performance so it can be used to host a high traffic site?
At the end of the day SharePoint is just a complicated web site with all the standard components.
In order to optimize performance you need to analyze each component and determine which one is a problem, and then adjust it accordingly.
We're in the process of implementing a 1000 concurrent user sharepoint website, which may or may not be large, however some steps we are taking are:
Implementing a detailed caching strategy, to cache webpart content intelligently.
Use load balanced servers to ensure all our hardware is utilised rather then lying idle.
We've undertaken capacity planning given the existing solution, so we have a good idea which component is the bottleneck for us. (The SQL Server), so we will ensure the server can cope with expected load and future growth of the site.
We're also using hardware load balancers which will ensure our network and the related servers operate as expected, and again this is something to investigate before you implement a sharepoint website.
We're also ensuring our webparts don't generate unnecessary html, and don't return unnecesary data, as this will slow down loading times.
Something which I definately think is a good idea is to have a goal to work towards, as you can spend a huge amount of money and time optimizing SharePoint, which may prove unnecessary.
My additional best bets are:
use x64 to allow more RAM on your server
Make the best use of your application pool recycling http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2007/10/29/sharepoint-app-pool-settings.aspx
Make sure all custom code properly disposes SPWeb and SPSite objects using this http://blogs.msdn.com/rogerla/archive/2008/02/12/sharepoint-2007-and-wss-3-0-dispose-patterns-by-example.aspx
utilize MS Capacity Planning Tool http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb961988.aspx
Plan your site collection and database sizes. Keeping your databases and site collections under control will be key
GOVERNANCE GOVERNANCE GOVERNANCE - Plan for site size limits and expiration strategy. Old data should be deleted or archived for better performance. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sharepointserver/bb507202.aspx
I cannot emphasize enough that proper early planning is essential for a successful SharePoint implementation.
In addition to caching and hardware, try to make sure that your masterpages and page layouts are not ghosted in the database (requiring a database call to retrieve).
Do this by ensuring the files get released to the 12 hive in your solution.
Don't forget careful selection of the built-in cache settings (choose the right one for your situation).
Use the BLOBCache.
Use IIS Compression/caching (the defaults are not enough BTW).
Ensure your SQL box can keep up, especially during indexing/crawling. Splitting the Application roles (indexing vs search query and dedicated WFE for indexing/crawling) helps.
BTW if you're running VMWare VMs for your WFEs, Windows NLB breaks (though not consistently), so use hardware NLBs or DNS round-robin, etc.
If you don't need > 2gig RAM for the IIS Application Pool on a WFE, don't bother with 64bit on the WFE.
Just my 2c.