Terrible DotNetNuke performance

Question

I'm involved with a project using DotNetNuke version 05.01.04 Community Edition. We are building our new Intranet using it, but performance is terrible.

We have five people adding pages and content to it and every 15-30 seconds they experience a pause of 10 seconds or longer before the system continues and the next screens loads.

The server is Windows 2003, 3.8GHz with 1GB of RAM. I'm told by our server admin that the CPU and memory performance don't appear to be the bottleneck.

We currently have 350 pages in the system, we a plan to add 1000. So we need to resolve this performance problem so that we can enter content and so we can go live.

I just can't see where the bottleneck is. Is there a good why to determine the bottleneck when using DotNetNuke?

Modules installed

• Publish:Engage (Not currently in use)
• Page Blaster (Doesn't appear to providing caching when users logged in using Integrated Authentication)
• SimpleGallery
• XMod
• Content Manager

IIS Setup
Application recycling completely disabled (Apart from a 2am recycle)

New findings: 18th March 2010
The main bottleneck was due to version 5.1.4 having a bug which caused 1300 database roundtrips on an average page, due to broken database in-memory caching. We've upgraded to 5.2.4 which has resolved this bottleneck.

Now the next biggest bottleneck is the navigation. We've used both DDR:Menu and DDN:Nav, but both have a major impact on performance.

Is there a navigation interface out there that doesn't drain performance so badly?

Answer 1

I think you need to start investigating this using performance profiling tools. For the DNN application itself I'd grab something like JetBrains DotTrace or Red Gate's ANTS Performance Profiler.

For the database SQL Server Profiler would be the first choice or a tool such as Red Gate's SQL Response.

Without profiling the application these you're going to be pulling at straws.

And as Tim pointed out in his comment, installing Firebug in Firefox with the YSlow add-in to see what resources are taking longest to serve to the browser.