We have done some investigation into the issue and found that there is hardly any load on the DB server, which tends to be a bottle neck in these types of solutions.
Since the there is hardly any load on the DB, it must be some sort of data caching going on. But the CPU on the front end server is going crazy which leads me to think that ASP.NET parses the pages for each request…?!?
Further we have a lot of personalized content on the site which means we cannot make use of standard output caching...Is there any recommendations on how to achieve this with EpiServer? I know one standard approach is to use the varybycustom based on the sessionId.
all tips are welcome
Cheers
After analyzing the tracelog on the webserver we see that there is a lot of hits on the Util/NotFound.aspx page. This occurs when requesting images that are stores in the unified filesystem...However...The page renders normally and all images are shown, even if the trace shows 404, Util/NotFound.aspx page
Can this have anything to do with our performance issues?
Probably not, but I won't say for certain.
Have you enabled a full log4net log? Look for FindPagesWithCriteria, and other suspicious looking log entries :-)
It will probably not give you any crystal clear indications on performance killers, but you never know.
Your best bet is to do a quick analyze of the site, and think about what parts could be slow. Think about loops, heavy computations, integrations etc. After that, add timers to the code, and log the results using log4net. Deploy the code, and look for things that are called many times, or things that takes long time to compute.
Performance problems can be hard to track down.
/Steve