Orchard CMS 1.5 Very Slow to Load Pages

3
votes

I am developing my first site using Orchard 1.5 and I am concerned about the speed of the site. I realize that in development mode that pages are being compiled dynamically which will cause slowness, but I have done the following to set the site to production mode, and still, from page to page, each request is taking anywhere from 2 to 6 seconds to display. Here is what I have done:

  1. Built the solution using a "Release" build
  2. Logged out from the site (viewing as anonymous)
  3. Set the application as the root site in IIS
  4. Disabled the "Shape Tracing" module
  5. Set the <compilation debug="false" ...> in the web.config
  6. Set the theme to the base TheThemeMachine theme

I only have 5 pages of very basic content and the home page contains only the default content from the setup of Orchard. All pages are slow to load. Here is my site map:

  • Home (2 sec load)
  • About Us (2 sec load)
    • Bios (a projection page - 6 sec load)
      • John Doe (2 sec load)
      • Mary Jane (2 sec load)

With these settings in place, the page load times are still unacceptably slow. I am only testing this on my local machine and haven't rolled it out to the production server yet, but my machine is a robust quad-core machine, running Windows 7 with 8GB of RAM, so I don't see how it's much different than our production servers. Since all the requests are local, the network bandwidth is a non-issue. The only thing that would be different than in full production is that the application is accessing the SQL server on the network, but I can't imagine that there is that much SQL traffic.

FYI - I am checking the load time from FireBug and only using the value from the initial GET to the server and not any ancillary requests.

Is what I am seeing normal for an Orchard site, or what other changes should I make to optimize performance? When I go to www.orchardproject.net, it is very snappy (<300ms response) even with all their content, so why is my simple configuration so slow?

3
asp.net-mvcorchardcms
Clearly not normal. You could of course enable caching, but first you should profile this. – Bertrand Le Roy
After a lot of profiling, I was able to find out that it was the accessing of a remote SQL server that was the culprit. I didn't think that there was that much traffic going over the pipe for all the SQL statements for Orchard, but there are. When I copied the database to my local development machine, the site became much more responsive. – bigmac
The db caching in 1.6 is also going to improve things further... – Bertrand Le Roy

3 Answers

3
votes

Why not run the Miniprofiler to measure where the slowdowns are before trying to optimize? You can get a module for Orchard to make it easy to plugin.

0
votes

I've just added the Caching module to Our new site as well as added all pages to the performance settings page that is standard with 1.5, this helps a lot.

0
votes

My site was getting progressively slower.. and I finally noticed that I had almost 50k comments! Most were marked as spam, but they were still filling up the database. I'm trying to clean them out now and will find out if this helps things or not (I'll update when I do)