Orchard CMS Performance

Question

I've started playing around with Orchard CMS for one of my websites and have noticed a fairly lengthy initial load time of my home page. I've not added much content to speak of, so what I am seeing is fairly close to the out of the box experience. I'm suspicious of this being somehow related to using Sql server compact on my shared hosting but don't yet know enough about what's under the hood to determine this. I'm looking for suggestioms of things to check that could be performance bottlenecks in Orchard's load times.

My next plan is to point my site to a sql server other than compact to see if performance improves, but I'd appreciate any suggestions of anything else I can check.

Answer 1

There are couple of issues regarding running Orchard (and possibly other ASP.NET CMS systems) on shared hosting. Providers recycle the AppPool frequently to allow higher app density on their servers. Cold start (startup) times for complex apps are long (because of startup construction of all the underlying objects). Frequent AppPool recycling makes cold starts happen frequent...:/

There is a thread on Orchard discussion board regarding performance problems on shared hosting.

Answer 2

This might be helpful: http://www.iis.net/download/ApplicationWarmup

IIS 7.5 provides an "Application Warm-Up" feature that requests pages with optional identities. I have not tried it but we are looking at using it on a custom app we have in house.

Answer 3

It's not mentioned in this thread, and it's quite important.

Ensure that you rename ./Config/Sample.HostComponents.config to ./Config/HostComponents.config when in production to disable Orchard's dynamic compilation.

That has certainly helped with performance.

Answer 4

Answer (to self): Check that the proper base url is set in Orchard general settings before trying to test performance. :$