Developer Summit Presentation

by: Steve Celius

For all of you that attended my presentation at the EPiServer Developer Summit on Friday, thank you so much for attending! We filled the biggest room! Hope you liked what you saw, and learned something new. If you have any questions regarding the presentation, please comment below (or join us on IRC).

All material and video presentations will also be published on EPiServer World when it is ready.

I have had quite a few requests to share the presentation already, so for you that cannot wait for everything to be uploaded to EPiServer World, here you are:

  Performance Troubleshooting EPiServer CMS Sites

Note: The presentation contains a few more slides than what I showed on the Developer Summit. A small bonus for those of you that read my blog.

I'll do some more follow up posts on this topic soon.

03 June 2008

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Comments

  1. Hi there, Browsing through your pres i notices that you state that "Web Gardens can hurt performance"...Could you elaborate? With multi core/cpu servers wouldn't the default assumption be that mote worker processes would boost performance? Sure, this depends on the application...but is there anything special EPiServer that does that makes you recommend not cranking up to several worker processes if you have more than one core/cpu? Cheers
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    03 June 2008 13:45 by: Lars

  2. Didn't see speakers notes until now... "Web Gardens for non asp.net and EPiServer sites can actually make sense. Something to try if you have long queues, but low cpu and memory utilization. It is like scaling out, but on the same server." Sure thing, but as much as it can hurt perf it could also boost it! And still think you should write up a piece on this topic...As you are the EPiServer Performance guru ;)
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    03 June 2008 13:50 by: LA

  3. More worker processes will only increase performance if your site uses non-threaded (or poorly threaded) resources (like CGI). For ASP.NET you will actually add overhead to an already optimized multithreaded application.

    However, it is something to try if you have long queues, but low cpu and memory utilization. It is like scaling out, but on the same server.

    Optimize your asp.net worker process (number of threads etc.) instead of using web gardens.

    /Steve
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    03 June 2008 13:56 by: Steve Celius (stevec)

  4. EPiServer sites in Web Gardens also need cache invalidation and will have separate PageData caches. Same goes for the output cache. I really can't see any uses for web gardens on EPiServer sites (but that does not mean there are none.) What boost would one get from using Web Gardens? Perhaps this changes with 64-bit and lots of memory? (Doubt it though).
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    03 June 2008 14:35 by: Steve Celius (stevec)

  5. Jupp, several worker processes would have separate caches... Again depending on the scenario/application it is possible to find workarounds for this "problem" for IIS hosted .NET apps. Eg using some sort of standalone caching software. Might not be applicable to type of sites EPiServer is mostly used for but it could be an option. Not quite sure how deep in the EPiServer core the new pluggable runtime cache is used, but potentially it could be possible to implement this interface on top of some caching technology like memcached or NCach... -L.A
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    03 June 2008 18:37 by: LA

  6. Yes, that is an option, but will it boost performance in regards to web gardens?

    ASP.NET will make use of multi core/cpu systems, and you can tweak the thread pool in the cases where you have queues longer than cpu/memory usage. You can even use async requests for IO bound threads to free more resources to incoming requests. My point is that web gardens can hurt performance because you invoke more overhead from using them than you gain in most EPiServer scenarios.

    It is a very good question though, and an interesting discussion (keep'em coming).

    Another thing; when I first heard about the pluggable runtime cache, I thought about the possible improvements to performance and scalability NCache (or something similar) would pose. For now, I have filed it in the "interesting for the lucky few" drawer :-)

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    03 June 2008 22:19 by: Steve Celius (stevec)

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Steve Celius

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I work for EPiServer in Norway, mostly with technical stuff. Trying to keep up with all the new stuff from the development team. I also hang out on the EPiCode project, why don't you come join us?

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