Improve SharePoint Online Performance
SharePoint serves to store thousands of documents and has the greatest growth rate in Microsoft’s history. Therefore, the application speed becomes crucial in such a scenario, especially for the seamless adoption and deployment of SharePoint. Below we will be discussing tips and tricks that will help your SharePoint servers run more efficiently.
Step # 1 – Separate Databases & User Traffic
Make sure to separate the access between SQL and front-end servers, either through distinct virtual LANs or physical networks. This helps in reducing the conflict between database and user traffic. To ensure that traffic is in the appropriate interface direction, this often calls for each front-end web server to have at least two different network interface cards along with well-defined static routes. The application and index servers can use the same configuration as well.
Step # 2 – Index All the Isolated Searches
A typical medium-sized server farm includes one or more web front-end servers, an exclusive index or application server, and a distinct SQL database server. The same servers which deliver user content must also handle search traffic that the index server initiates. You may also add a server to the farm to handle search requests and prevent conflicts between search and user traffic.
The farm administrator will instead set the search service up so that it only crawls against this specific server. During index operations, this setup may minimize traffic for up to 70% of the web front-end servers.
Step # 3 – Modify Your SQL Settings & Parameters
Provisioning the main SharePoint databases on different physical discs is one fast method to prevent future issues (or Logic Unit Numbers in case of storage-area network involvement). This calls for separate sets of discs for temporary databases, search databases, and content databases. This calls for separate sets of discs for search databases, temporary databases, and content databases. It’s important to give isolating the log files (*.ldf) more attention. Although they don’t use as much I/O as other files, these are crucial for backup and recovery and can end up being many times as large as the master database files.
Another strategy is to actively control the expansion and size of particular databases. By default, SQL expands database files by 1MB increments or at a predefined percentage of the database size i.e., usually 10%. Such settings may result in SQL wastage cycles. This usually happens when the databases are constantly growing. SQL may even stop writing new data if the networks are persistently expanding. Alternatively, if extra space is available, you can also pre-size the databases to the optimum advised size (100GB). You can also set up auto-growth to a pre-set size (20MB or 10MB).
Step # 4 – Clean Up Database Indexes/Database Defragmentation
To increase the effectiveness of queries and read operations, SQL Server keeps its very own set of indexes for data coming from disparate databases. These indexes may disintegrate, just like files kept on a disc. Planning for routine maintenance activities, such as index defragmentation, is crucial. One must pay additional attention and caution when planning such tasks. Because these tasks have resource-intensive nature and a repetitive inability to read or write data from the indexes.
Step # 5 – Distribute User Information Throughout Various Content Databases
Document libraries, Tasks, picture libraries, announcements, issues, and other types of SharePoint data are typically kept in lists. The content-database connected to the site collection contains a significant portion of this data in a single table. There is only one connected content database for each site collection, regardless of the number of sites and subsites your SharePoint hierarchy contains. Thus, a site collection with a huge number of subsites stores the majority of the user data from each list within every site in a singular SQL table.
SQL must continuously run queries over one possibly very large dataset, which can cause latency. Taking care of the site collection to content database mapping is one approach to lighten the workload. The central administrative interface (CAI) allows administrators to pre-stage content databases. This ensures efficient connectivity between site collections and a single database. CAI also validates the existence of logical order in a grouping of site collections based on priority and size. Administrators can also choose amid content databases when establishing new site collections by modifying the “maximum number of sites” parameter or altering the database status to “offline.”
Step # 6 – Optimize Your Page Size
It is simple to manage content and find resources for SharePoint users connecting to the portal via a LAN. However, for the users on the opposite end of a slower WAN link, the heavyweight structure of a typical SharePoint page can be a true performance killer. Start with a simple master page if you have a lot of distant users. This will allow designers to start with a blank slate and just contain the essential functionality needed for the page to load properly.
Second, the majority of SharePoint sites contain links to supporting files like style sheets and JavaScript. This often results in longer download and run time. To avoid the problem designers often use a known method called “delayed loading”. This fetches the linked files in the backend while the rest of the page is rendering. As a result, it allows designers to change how SharePoint pages retrieve these resources. From a default value of no compression (0) to full compression (10), you can easily change the IIS compression settings. This determines how aggressively IIS should run the compression algorithms.
Step 8: Benefit from Caching
Documents, list items, query results, and web components are just a few examples of the types of content that are present in cache memory to meet user demand. To accommodate a variety of user needs, site managers can define their cache profiles. Content editors can see a more recent perspective of content modifications than general readers by assigning one set of cache settings to anonymous users while assigning a different set to registered users. Administrators can specify caching on the server, the client, or both. You can also configure cache profiles through page types. This allows the publishing layout and pages to behave individually.
Additionally, the SharePoint Object Cache can considerably reduce the execution time for components that require a lot of resources, such as the Content Query Web Part. For each Web application, it is possible to cache frequently requested, large assets on disc. This commonly includes files and photos and caching them helps in speeding up page delivery.
Step # 9 – Page Customizations
Power users and administrators can benefit from SharePoint Designer, but page customization might be detrimental to overall efficiency. When a page is customized, the database must be queried each time the page is accessed to receive the complete page’s content, including the inline and markup code. On a page-by-page approach, this adds minimal extra overhead. However, in bigger setups with thousands of pages, running back and forth to the database can result in substantial performance loss.
Administrators should put in place a policy that limits page customizations to only ‘necessary’ circumstances, to prevent this issue. Administrators of site collections and farms can also disable the Designer’s use, if necessary. They can also utilize the ‘reset to site definition’ option to reverse modifications and return to the original material.
Step # 10 – Restrict Depth of Navigation
The global, fly-out, and drop-down menu at the top of the web page, is among the key design components of any portal website. It initially appears to be a convenient way to travel between all the different websites and pages. But as it gets deeper and more cluttered, it completely loses its potential for easy navigation after the first few layers. Even worse, on websites with complex hierarchies, retrieving all the information needed to fill the navigation menus can be resource-intensive.
By changing the settings for the various navigation controls on the master page, SharePoint designers can modify the depth and level of every navigation level. Administrators must also limit the depth to a controllable minimum so as not to hinder performance.
Code Creators Inc. a SharePoint Development Company with a focus on performance. We assist businesses in better understanding the various areas and circumstances in which SharePoint performs.