Sitecore performance optimization - Sitecore configurations, IIS configurations

Question

We are planning to deploy our system in the production server. I am interested in learning more about optimizing the performance of the website.

1. What are the optimizations recommended for Sitecore? (Caching, other settings in web config)
2. What are the optimizations we can do in IIS?

Could not find a good article on these topics. Appreciate any help :).

Answer 1

Have you looked through all the Sitecore recommended practices and Performance Tuning Guide and applied all these?

Take a look at these tips and tricks to help optimize your Sitecore website and take a look at this going live checklist for Sitecore websites. Also a lot of good information in this John West Blog post.

Have you designed your components to be cacheable in the most efficient way in the first place? Ensure you have your caching set correctly:

• Caching via Sitecore’s HTML Cache
• Cache Configuration Reference
• How to verify HTML cache is working

Have you conducted any load testing simulation on your site? There are a bunch of tools, look at jMeter and LoadUI to simulate traffic. You may also want to review the C# code to make suer there is no bottlenecks.

I have found that 90% of the time a lot of perceived performance issues are down to the frontend rendering. Make sure your markup is light weight as possible, your JS and CSS is minified and code is optimized.

• Optimize browser rendering
• Writing efficient CSS selectors
• Sitecore Front-end Development Best Pracctices

Use the tools available to see where your front-end bottlenecks are:

• Yahoo YSlow
• Google PageSpeed