Sitefinity 6.2 site too slow on first load

Question

We're running a Sitefinity 6.2 site on IIS 7.5. For some reason, the site is extremely slow on first load(above 90Sec). There are not many images (Only 4 png's, the largest being 163KB) that could slow down the site. We've tried rebuilding the database indexes to no avail.

There are a couple of other Sitefinity websites of older versions on the web server. We've not had this problem with the older versions.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

We've had this issue with all our Sitefinity sites, the first hit takes a long time for the site to get going. What we've done to combat this is run a task in task scheduler every five minutes that runs a C# exe which sends off a web request to each site:

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    var sitefinitySites = new List<Uri>
                             {
                                 new Uri("http://www.example.com")
                             };

    using (var client = new WebClient())
    {
        foreach (var site in sitefinitySites)
        {
            try
            {
                client.DownloadString(site);
            }
            catch (WebException ex)
            {
                //send an email or something because the site might be down
            }
        }
    }
}

Answer 2

IIS's application pool by default is set to go to sleep if there site is not being used. This ensures that the resources are returned to the system for other sites.

Busy sites therefore don't experience this lag on 'waking up'.

Watch this video to illustrate how you can make the Sitefinity site 'always' available. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=zRqMAVnOUhw.

Alon

Firewater Interactive

http://www.firewater.net

Answer 3

What about IIS "Always Running" feature http://developers.de/blogs/damir_dobric/archive/2009/10/11/iis-7-5-and-always-running-web-applications.aspx