Blog

January 10th, 2012

Content Management, Technical

The following blog post is part of a series on Sitecore optimization from the forthcoming NavigationArts’ whitepaper entitled “Advanced Sitecore Performance Optimization”.  View more posts in this series here http://blog.navigationarts.com/tag/sitecore-optimization/.

Load testing is a necessary and often overlooked tool in the optimizer’s arsenal, often relegated to a step after optimization has taken place.  Indeed, at first blush, load testing might seem less of an analysis tool than pure validation.  Ideally, if you have optimized well, then your Sitecore site will perform well under load, and vice-versa.  If you haven’t, then a load test might tell you which of your components is the bottleneck – hardware (CPU, memory), networking (bandwidth, location), code, etc – but not necessarily why.  Depending on circumstances, however, a load test can provide valuable insight into why a site is performing poorly.

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Alan Gallauresi

January 3rd, 2012

Content Management, Technical

The Sitecore CMS is nothing if not completely flexible.  I’ve been working with Sitecore for almost 4 years now, and have yet to encounter something I can’t customize if I really want to. Recently, a project that I was working on had special requirements for the Sitecore Workbox.  The Workbox is sort of like the To-Do list for content authors and editors.  It shows all of the content items that are in the various states of workflow, and CMS users look in the Workbox to see what they must review or approve.  The project that I was working on was a multi-site implementation and there was a requirement that the Workbox should display the name of the site next to each content item in the Workbox.  This would help the CMS users figure out which content items they needed to work on.

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Corey Burnett

December 27th, 2011

Content Management, Technical

The following blog post is part of a series on Sitecore optimization from the forthcoming NavigationArts’ whitepaper entitled “Advanced Sitecore Performance Optimization”.  View more posts in this series here http://blog.navigationarts.com/tag/sitecore-optimization/.

Sitecore, like many “frying” CM systems, is fundamentally a dynamic database application, albeit with a thick layer of interface, API, and .NET coding between a programmer and the raw query data.  Indeed, SQL is often as much of a workhorse as the production web delivery servers, and most times, more.  For that reason, a developer has to be aware of the impact of retrieving data from the SQL Server on load times, and cognizant of other demands on the SQL server’s resources such as 3^rd party databases, maintenance plans, and whether configuration has been optimized.

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Alan Gallauresi

December 14th, 2011

Content Management, Technical

The following blog post is part of a series on Sitecore optimization from the forthcoming NavigationArts’ whitepaper entitled “Advanced Sitecore Performance Optimization”.  View more posts in this series here http://blog.navigationarts.com/tag/sitecore-optimization/.

Out of the box, Sitecore provides a host of tools for performance analysis from within and outside the Sitecore authoring environment.  Since a large percentage of the potential to improve site performance comes from the interaction of developer code with the Sitecore environment, the following tools are invaluable in determining slow elements and configuration issues.

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Alan Gallauresi

December 5th, 2011

Content Management, Technical

The following blog post is part of a series on Sitecore optimization from the forthcoming NavigationArts’ Whitepaper entitled “Advanced Sitecore Performance Optimization”.  You can view more blog  posts in this series here.

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Alan Gallauresi