Optimizing Sharepoint - an IT Operations perspective

Full circle

2008-11-22T22:56:00Z

After my last post back in March, my role at work changed and rather than focusing on reactive, break/fix MOSS issues, I was focused heavily in deploying MOSS from scratch in several environments. However, as of Monday I will be taking on a new role which will incorporate both the break/fix and deployments of MOSS and will begin posting more frequently. If you are still on the fence on whether to blog or not, I definitely recommend giving it a shot. At first it was very painful for me to get into...(read more)

MOSS Design Considerations

2008-03-19T19:39:00Z

MOSS Design Considerations taken from Optimizing Office SharePoint Server for WAN environments & Optimizing custom Web parts for the WAN and my expereinces Recommendation : Minimize the amount of secured items on a page Reason : When a user authenticates, two things happen. First, the system validates credentials to determine who the user is. Second, the role provider enumerates the list of SharePoint groups to which the user belongs. Each time a page is requested, the role provider is called...(read more)

MOSS Server Performance Considerations

2008-03-19T19:25:00Z

MOSS Server Performance Considerations taken from Optimizing Office SharePoint Server for WAN environments and my experiences Recommendation : use x64 hardware on all servers to optimize page downloads by minimizing number of round trips between client computers and server computers. Reason : With x64 you are not limited to 2 GB of Memory. Benefit : Reduces network traffic and latency due to FE servers hitting the memory limit and needing to recycle. Recommendation : apply Windows Server 2003 SP2...(read more)

Client Side Performance Considerations

2008-03-19T19:12:00Z

Recommendation : Help Users ensure that they have configured their computers optimally. Reason : Having the right combination of BIOS, drivers, and manufacturer tools is critical for a computer system performance and stability. Benefit : Optimizes the Users’ computer performance Since performance is subjective, from a client's point of view, make sure and provide your Users with guidance on how they can optimize their laptops and desktops to enhance their browsing experience. For example: If I am...(read more)

Troubleshooting the “This Page has been modified since you opened it. You must open the page again." error

2008-03-10T07:24:00Z

Problem: When anyone tried to edit a content editor web part on a MOSS site, they would get the following error: “This Page has been modified since you opened it. You must open the page again. Refresh page“ The users would hit F5 to refresh the page, but they would still get the same error message. Tools used to help troubleshoot: Sharepoint Designer, MOSS Site and Content and Structure Page Resolution: 1. We checked that no pages were checked out or locked by another user, using the tools above....(read more)

Real world things that were done to improve the performance on a MOSS Enterprise Portal

2008-03-10T06:27:00Z

Over the past 2 years, I've spent may days and nights trying to optimize our MOSS Enterprise Portals' performance (i.e. rendering time). In the end, the 3 biggest perf gains came from the following: 1. moving from x32 to x64 OS 2. moving the farm content dbs from a shared/busy SQL Backend Server to a dedicated/quieter one 3. moving from a 100 MB to 1 GB NIC connection on all of the Front end Servers Although this did not solve all of our problems, it helped buy us time to perform a deeper investigation...(read more)

Troubleshooting Series: Identifying Network Latency

2008-03-10T06:21:00Z

I recently watched a webcast done by Laura Chappell on how to troubleshoot a slow network. She did an exceptional job in providing the essential information I needed in analyzing network captures for latency. Before I get ahead of myself, here are some key concepts and tools that you should familiarize yourself with: The TCP Triple Handshake Besides the fact that I get asked this question in every interview I have ever been to in the last 8 years, understanding how this works help you when troubleshooting...(read more)

Automated or Silent or Unattended MOSS farm Installation and Configuration

2008-03-09T08:17:00Z

As an Ops person, one of the things that excites me is automation and being able to use technology to make my life easier. At the MS Sharepoint Conference, Ben Curry from Mindsharp gave a great presentation on how to perform an automated install of a MOSS farm using psconfig and stsadm commands. I haven't had a chance to try and tweak it for my work environment, however from what I saw, it was fantastic! Here is a template of how my current team has been approaching this silent or unattended MOSS...(read more)

Troubleshooting Series - Part 1 - First steps

2008-03-09T07:28:00Z

I had the privilege of attending a session at the MS Sharepoint 2008 Conference covering how MS Support troubleshoots MOSS issues. The session really hit home on how depending on a person’s experience and confidence, they will either make lots of changes hoping to get things fixed or they will do a lot of analysis and end up taking too long to find a solution. Below is the initial process that I follow when someone asks me for help in solving a problem. Understanding that each issue/problem is unique,...(read more)

still learning how to blog....

2008-03-09T01:34:00Z

Unfortunately, i'm still ramping up on how to blog and how to make my site look pretty and be organized well. Rather then waiting any longer, i'm gonna jump in and start posting some of the great stuff I have learned over the past few months, especially from TechReady 6 and the MS Sharepoint 2008 Conference that just finished. So think of this as a brain dump first and then an orginaztion of the site (i.e. ensuring that the tags are in sync) at a later date. thanks for your patience. wayne...(read more)

you can expect to see more regular and detailed postings starting in Jan 2008

2007-12-26T22:02:00Z

After writing my first two posts, I realized that this wasn’t as easy as I originally thought and spent the last three months researching other blogs and analyzing what I liked or looked for when reading them. I noticed that the ones I bookmarked contained details versus being very generic like my two first posts. L Starting in Jan 2008, I am going to start posting more detailed posts on topics that I experienced in supporting SharePoint that would help those who administer and support it on a daily...(read more)

Troubleshooting the MOSS error: "An unexpected error has occurred"

2007-09-30T16:45:00Z

Change the following values in your web.config file so that you can see what the actual error is: 1. Change CallStack="false" to CallStack="true" 2. Change <customErrors mode="On"/> to <customErrors mode="Off "/> 3. Change <compilation batch="false" debug="false"> to <compilation batch="false" debug="true"> When you are done, make sure to change these three back to its original value as there is a performance hit when these are turned on/enabled....(read more)

A good tool to measure Caching, Size of pages, Authentication and Performance is Fiddler:

2007-09-26T01:23:00Z

· you can go to http://www.fiddler2.com to get the tool and then: · Training: http://fiddler2.com/Fiddler/help/ - I watched the demonstration videos, which were helpful · Fiddler PowerToy - Part 1: HTTP Debugging: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb250446.aspx · Fiddler PowerToy - Part 2: HTTP Performance: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb250442.aspx · see http://httpweb for some more details on the status codes...(read more)

Welcome Everyone!

2007-09-24T23:47:00Z

This blog is focused on sharing some of the best practices, lessons learned and scenarios that I have encountered over the past several years supporting SharePoint in an Enterprise IT environment. My background and expertise is in IT Operations, so this blog is focused on Operational issues such as Performance, Scalability and Monitoring of SharePoint farms. Thanks for taking the time to check out my blog. wayne All opinions are my own and do not represent any company or affiliation....(read more)