Professional SharePoint® 2007 Web Content Management Development: Building Publishing Sites with Office SharePoint Server 2007

Chapter 19. Performance Tips, Tricks, and Traps

Prior releases of SharePoint focused on team-based collaboration sites, corporate intranets or extranets that typically had a finite audience. Even though the total potential audience for a team site or corporate intranet is not as significant as an anonymous site, performance was still an issue with SharePoint sites. The same is true in the most recent release of SharePoint in both Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 and Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007. The added capability of hosting content-centric anonymous sites on the SharePoint platform makes performance even more of an issue today.

The significant architectural change in the SharePoint foundation, i.e., being built on top of ASP .NET 2.0 rather than in a side-by-side model as in WSS 2.0, provided the most significant performance benefit to the platform. This change facilitated the removal of the ISAPI filter from Internet Information Services (IIS) that glued SharePoint together with ASP.NET 1.1 and was the cause for a significant drag on the performance of any SharePoint 2.0 site.

MOSS 2007 provides additional performance optimization opportunities above and beyond what WSS 3.0 offers out of the box (OOTB). Site administrators and developers can take advantage of ASP.NET 2.0 caching techniques to reduce the burden on SharePoint Web Front End (WFE) servers as well as SQL Servers. This chapter covers the different caching techniques, as well as ways to extend and customize ...