Tips & Tricks for Enhancing AspDotNetStorefront’s Performance

[Guidance]

As an AspDotNetStorefront Enterprise Partner, Guidance has built dozens of sites on the ML platform, including Z Gallerie, Simplicity, Caltech, Bentley Prince Street, Drum Channel, A.C. Moore, GEARYS, Pollstar, and many others. Each site has had its unique set of requirements, but after building so many of them, we began identifying standard ways to enhance the performance of AspDotNetStorefront. We like sharing our findings so we thought we would post some of them. Here they are:

1. Data caching should be turned on for the website. Any customizations that involve database calls should leverage the data caching in AspDotNetStorefront and turn on/off with the caching switch in the admin website/backend.
2. Remove unnecessary database calls from the website (including those for features that are turned off), especially from the header since it is loaded in every page.
3. Ensure that no other services (i.e. antivirus software with firewalls, etc.) are running on the server, as they might slow down the performance of the website.
4. Configure SQL Server temporary tables to use a temporary file per core, so that cores aren’t locking each other out on one file.
5. Search stored procedure is very big and generally, very intensive. Improvements to this could boost performance. Common searches could also be cached.
6. Configure static and dynamic compression within IIS to find the appropriate balance between smaller file sizes served and compression performance.
7. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN). Determine an appropriate traffic threshold at which it is cost-effective to leverage a CDN. In doing so, one can plan for the CDN at the beginning of a project, rather than implementing it as an emergency solution to a poorly performing site.

If this list is helpful, let us know!

--- Guidance (www.guidance.com)

[mvegas]

Not sure why but I noticed a huge improvement in performance when I started using AspDotNetStoreFront with Mozilla Firefox. Everything is 10 times faster.

[danieljlucas]

I'm also seeing a huge performance increase when using browsers other than IE (specifically we are all using IE8 here). Both Chrome and Firefox have no delay in login and navigation. Anyone know why this might be?

Thanks.

[valentim]

Thanks for posting these! Also add to the list "Run Monthly Maintenance" found on the admin home page.

[danegus]

The biggest performance increase will definitely come from doing SQL server tuning.

It is usually a good idea to have a tempdb data file for each core in your machine (being used by SQL)... Here is a good link from microsoft on the subject : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms175527.aspx

[chazandchaz]

The biggest performance increase will definitely come from doing SQL server tuning.

It is usually a good idea to have a tempdb data file for each core in your machine (being used by SQL)... Here is a good link from microsoft on the subject : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms175527.aspx

There is a link at the bottom of the page you sited that suggests 1 tempDB per Core is a Myth.

http://www.sqlskills.com/BLOGS/PAUL/...ssor-core.aspx

Which method would provide the best performance for the SQL server on ASPDOTNETSTOREFRONT?

Chaz.