DotNetNuke Performance Tips
Every website run’s into the ghost of a machine. Latency issues? Long responses for client requests? All ghosts, in which can make managing a DotNetNuke instance very painful. But what can we do?
Lets try and solve a couple of these problems!
Database Size:
As you can guess, the size of your database is very important. Lets clean it up a tad.
First take a look at your “EventLog” table. As you can probably guess from the name, it stores events that happen such as when a user log’s in, when someone tries to login, and just general errors that occur. Yes this is important, but honestly… it is only important in the beginning and the end of your applications life. During the middle of the applications life cycle, I suggest turning it off. Make sure you delete the irritating records left in the DB as well.
To Turn off the Event Log, go to your DNN Host Settings page, and ensure the “Site Log History” setting is set to 0(zero).
A couple other tables to clean out would be “SiteLog” and “Scheduler log”.. These records are also just wasting space on the disk.
Database Scripts:
As well, DNN has plenty of washed-up crappy scripts in it’s possession. You can fix a lot of this by using DNNScripts off of codeplex.
The Application:
First thing to keeping a clean application, is when hosted with IIS. Make sure you application stays alive! If no one visits you website once every twenty minutes, IIS by default shuts it down, therefore causing the first user after those 20 minutes endure a painstakingly slow initial page load time. You can prevent this by using Pingdom or PingAlive . However, if you have access to the server, I suggest you change the Idle Time-out settings.
Afraid that the pinging will mess with your site statistics? Try creating a sub site, on the same application and then having the service ping it instead. That way you can go about your business as usual.
Here is another good resource on ensuring your application is alive at all times. I haven’t actually tried it though.. as it is not specific for DNN. : CodeProject – Keep Your Website Alive
Does you site have a lot of static information? Cache it! You can do this via changing the performance settings to heavy caching.
Module Optimization:
Make sure you use SQL Profiler to find long running scripts, usually from 3rd party modules. Then report those issues to their developers. I like to think, no script should surpass 500ms on the norm.
Remove unused modules from your server. If you aren’t using them, then neither should DNN. Get rid of them!
Your Skin:
Install YSlow and make sure you get an A for performance! You can usually find errors in how things are GZIPed and maybe combine your CSS and JS files to get better performance.
Hopefully one or a few of these methods described will help you with your site. If you have any other tips or comments about how to improve DNN’s performance, feel free to let me know with a comment below.
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