Hints on how to speed up initialization

Here’s some hints on how you can speed up initialization of your EPiServer sites.

In the “lang” directory you have all the system languages. These are parsed and loaded into the memory. It might be the case that you don’t really need all of these. If you have a load balanced or mirroring setup with front servers and servers for editors maybe you just need one system language on front servers.

With the site setting stringDelayedLoadThreshold in web.config it’s possible to set a string length limit for what’s being loaded during initialization. So a value of 50 means that all strings shorter than 50 will be loaded directly and all strings longer than 50 will be loaded on demand.

In R2 SP1 this was standard that all requests goes to a page showing “Application is initializing. Please retry shortly.” in R2 SP2 this was changed to that you could choose yourself what behavior you want with having or removing ApplicationInitializing.txt. Basically if you have this text file all requests will not be queued up. So the application will start up faster.
See Magnus blog for more information: http://labs.episerver.com/en/Blogs/Magnus-Strale/Dates/2009/4/EPiServer-Initialization-and-quotApplication-is-busy-under-initialization-phasequot/

EPiServer goes through dll’s in bin folder to check for different attributes like plugins:

[GuiPlugIn(DisplayName = "MyPlugIn",
Description = "Just a sample",
Url = "~/myplugin/Sample.ascx",
Area = PlugInArea.EditPanel)]

If you have assemblies that doesn’t use any of these attributes, like referenced assemblies for instance it might be a good idea to setup probing of assemblies to another folder then bin. Something like:
  <runtime>
      <assemblyBinding xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1">
          <probing privatePath="bin\subbin" />
For more information see Scotts blog: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=4d0ef4fb-f8ae-4355-a658-3c0432c98dbe

Please post any other ideas.