Episerver CMS 6 Slow page load

Question

Hy,

I am developing an Episerver Site, and experiencing a very poor page load speed

Configuration used:

• Amazon AWS Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter
• 8 GB RAM, 64 bit op. system
• Microsoft Sql Server 2008 R2
• IIS 7.5

Followed http://world.episerver.com/Blogs/Alexander-Haneng/Dates/2011/12/Starting-CMS-6-R2-sites-faster-after-build/ blog post, but not got a huge performance changing

Also enabled Trace in web.config, and i see in trace.axd that between: Begin Load and End Load there is a huge loading time: 20 seconds sometimes, and not for the first load.

Also having trouble when enabling "Dynamic data cache in IIS" which causes the pages to not load any more, i got error message content encoding error, as i saw this comes from Content-Length Header, that it is not matching the required length.

I am not understanding why takes a page to load in ~4 seconds in general, any help would appreciated, thanks

Answer 1

Without optimization EPiServer can be quite slow at cold start, but serves pages extremely fast unless you run out of memory in the app pool - and you shouldn't with 8 GB of RAM.

Things to check:

• App pool behavior: does CPU spike with every page load? Is the app pool using a lot of physical memory? Are there any memory limits imposed on the app pool?
• On the start page of Admin mode of the site backend there are cache stats. Cache hits should be really high (> 90%) or something is wrong with the cache.
• Are you sure it's server-side lag - what does Developer Tools/Firebug say?
• Have you enabled log4net logging? It can be extremely useful when troubleshooting performance issues. If yes, have you mapped your own configuration file? (we had extreme performance issues from that - use the built-in mapping to episerverlog.config)
• Are you having issues with all templates? What if you create a barebone test template with no master page/main layout view and do nothing but output a property.
• Any suspicious events logged in the event log?

Answer 2

The answer is most likely in your templates if the site is slow in both DEV and Amazon environment.

Try a "barebone test template" as Anders suggests.

Also do a trace using for example dotTrace http://www.jetbrains.com/profiler/ and/or possibly SQL Profiler to see if you find something slow or something that occurs way too often.