Orchard CMS Performance

Question

I've started playing around with Orchard CMS for one of my websites and have noticed a fairly lengthy initial load time of my home page. I've not added much content to speak of, so what I am seeing is fairly close to the out of the box experience. I'm suspicious of this being somehow related to using Sql server compact on my shared hosting but don't yet know enough about what's under the hood to determine this. I'm looking for suggestioms of things to check that could be performance bottlenecks in Orchard's load times.

My next plan is to point my site to a sql server other than compact to see if performance improves, but I'd appreciate any suggestions of anything else I can check.

Topside

Answer 1

There are couple of issues regarding running Orchard (and possibly other ASP.NET CMS systems) on shared hosting. Providers recycle the AppPool frequently to allow higher app density on their servers. Cold start (startup) times for complex apps are long (because of startup construction of all the underlying objects). Frequent AppPool recycling makes cold starts happen frequent...:/

There is a thread on Orchard discussion board regarding performance problems on shared hosting.

Thew

Based on the behavior I'm seeing, this seems likely to be the problem. I get a slow initial load time but if I come back in right after, things load quickly. I'm going to try the application warm-up suggestion mentioned on the Orchard discussion board. - thanks – Topside

You're, welcome:) If you have access to the IIS Management Console - using the Application Warmup plugin is surely the easiest way to boost performance on shared hosting. – Thew

My install runs slowly and I have a dedicated box so not sure what is going on there... – Demonography

Perhaps you can use tcpping to ping your site scheduled at some interval – Nahshu

@PiotrSzmyd: Not sure that's the case, I've a dedicated box with 16GB ram, Quad core i7 @ 2.8GHz, SSD disks, .NET 4.5, VS2012. The CMS has 1 test article (<1 page) and 1 blog post and it takes about 3 minutes to get this started in the Azure emulator (after emulator' fired up). – Predestine

@Sid That's not normal. In this setup it should be blazing fast. I bet it's related to Azure emulator somehow (why do you use Azure emulator in first place?). I've been running multiple Orchard instances (single tenant each) on far less powerful machine and cold start never took more than a couple seconds. – Thew

Answer 2

This might be helpful: http://www.iis.net/download/ApplicationWarmup

IIS 7.5 provides an "Application Warm-Up" feature that requests pages with optional identities. I have not tried it but we are looking at using it on a custom app we have in house.

Housemaid

Yes, it's surely the best option, but you'd need access to IIS and privilege to install plugins. He is using shared hosting and most hosters won't allow you to have those... – Thew

FYI, forums.iis.net/t/1176740.aspx now says that the module has been removed as of 03-24-2011, 2:06 PM. "The Application Warm-Up Beta has been temporarily removed from iis.net. This decision has been made because the direction of the module is being revised and the continued distribution of the existing beta is no longer applicable." – Landeros

Answer 3

It's not mentioned in this thread, and it's quite important.

Ensure that you rename ./Config/Sample.HostComponents.config to ./Config/HostComponents.config when in production to disable Orchard's dynamic compilation.

That has certainly helped with performance.

Domenic

Answer 4

Answer (to self): Check that the proper base url is set in Orchard general settings before trying to test performance. :$

Eminent