Building high scale, highly available websites in SharePoint 2010

Building high scale, high availability websites in SharePoint 2010
Ben Robb
MVP, SharePoint Server
CTO, cScape Ltd

Agenda
What is “high” and why is it important?
How do you test performance?
What impacts performance?
Reducing server load
Reducing page payload
Reducing requests to the server
High availability

What I’m not covering
General best practice for deploying large scale SharePoint implementations
Deep dive code examples
Detailed test planning
Metrics
SharePoint 2010 only went to RTM last week…

What is “high”?
Not as high as you think
Most of the pointers in this session can be used by all deployments
Trading scale and availability is sometimes a judgement call
Most of the strategy in this session is relevant in any web site - ASP.NET applications, MOSS, SP2010

Why is this important?
Speed of response is critical to website success
Amazon found that a 100ms increase in page response time led to a 1% drop in sales (Kohavi and Longbotham2007)
When the homepage of Google Maps was reduced from 100KB to 70-80KB, traffic went up 10% in the first week, and an additional 25% in the following three weeks (Farber 2006)

Reducing set up and running costs
Lower hardware costs
Lower software costs
Lower maintenance costs
vs.
Higher testing and development costs
If you don’t do it right first time…

Performance Testing Toolkit
Browser Test Tools
Fiddler
IE Developer Toolbar
YSlow
Load Test Tools
TinyGet
Visual Studio Test Edition
HP LoadRunner [aka Mercury]
External tools
SaaS load testers [e.g. Keynote]

Types of performance testing
Load testing
How does my application perform with the expected number of users?
Spike testing
How many users do I have when my application fails?
Endurance (soak) testing
What happens over a long period continuous load?

Goals
Set performance goals based on your requirements
Concurrency / Throughput
Server response times
Page weight
Develop a test plan
What user journeys to test?
Benchmark and repeat your tests

Performance Testing

What impacts performance?
Workload on the servers in responding to a request
The size of the page payload
Number of requests to the server

Reduce the workload
Server topology
Custom code
Deployment techniques
Caching techniques
Offload SSL

Reduce the workloadServertopologies
Follow best practice for scalability of SharePoint Farms
Switch off unused services in SharePoint and Windows
Separate Authoring Farm from Production Farm
Set the Content Databases on Production to be Read-Only
Use SQL Mirroring to synchronise between the Author and Production Farm

Reduce the workloadTaxonomy and site structure
Don’t mix secure and insecure content
Caching efficiencies
(Also reduces management overhead)

Reduce the workloadManaged code
Apply standard .NET best practice
Exception handling
Defensively code your applications
Do not catch exceptions you can’t handle
Fail early
Clean up in Finally {} blocks
Understand how .NET manages objects

Reduce the workloadManaged code
SharePoint specific best practice
Be careful of what is going on under the hood
“list.Items.Count” will hydrate every item…
Properly dispose of objects
Aggregation / Rollup
Use out of the box controls (XsltListView) or if custom code is required use PortalSiteMapProvider or Search
Never iterate through collections of strongly typed SharePoint objects

Reduce the workloadDeployment techniques
Deploy via Features and Solutions
Keep files un-customized
Customized pages rely on the safe mode parser

Reduce the workloadCaching techniques
Output Caching
Use the Anonymous cache profile
BLOB caching

Reduce the workloadOffload work to the other servers
SSL
Resource intensive
Should be dealt with by the firewall or dedicated hardware
Custom Service Applications
Allows you to offload expensive workloads to other servers

Reducing the server workload

Reducing page payload
ViewState
Valid XHTML
No inline style
Lazy load JavaScript files
IIS Compression

Page payload

Reducing the page payload

Reducing the number of requests
Consolidate files together during the build
Minimize the number of JS and CSS files you are deploying – either manually or in MSBuild scripts
Use AJAX to reduce the number of complete page roundtrips
Remove unneeded OOTB scripts and CSS
Use CSS Sprites
Split asset requests off to another FQDN
Use Content Delivery Networks where possible

Reducing page requests

CDNs
Content Delivery Networks cache content around the world
Reduces latency
Scales to millions of users
Not applicable for personalised content
May require changes to applications to take full advantage

Uses for CDNs
Host streaming media
“Smooth HD” from Microsoft & Akamai
Host standard frameworks - jQuery, AJAX
http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.3.2.min.js
Host complete sites
Uses Akamai or similar

High availabilityFarm topology
Apply general availability best practice
Move other services off your web front end servers
Consider the usage patterns of your web application – mostly read-only in WCM scenarios
Make sure you have no single points of failure
Use the Service Application load balancing to provide services
CDNs also help here

High availabilityImprovements in SP 2010
Sandboxed solutions
Allow system administrators control over resources used by custom code
Small performance hit for running in a separate thread
Health Analyser and server monitoring
Catch issues earlier
Patch management

Key takeaways
Reduce your server workload
Reduce the size of the page payload
Reduce the number of requests to the server
Measure, benchmark, test and retest your performance

Thank you for attending!
Any questions?
Contact me:
ben@cscape.com
http://sharepointtales.wordpress.com
@benrobb

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Building high scale, highly available websites in SharePoint 2010

by Ben Robb on Apr 26, 2010

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Building high scale, highly available websites in SharePoint 2010 — Presentation Transcript