Chapter 19. Performance Tips, Tricks, and Traps

Prior releases of SharePoint focused on team-based collaboration sites, corporate intranets or extranets that typically had a finite audience. Even though the total potential audience for a team site or corporate intranet is not as significant as an anonymous site, performance was still an issue with SharePoint sites. The same is true in the most recent release of SharePoint in both Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 and Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007. The added capability of hosting content-centric anonymous sites on the SharePoint platform makes performance even more of an issue today.

The significant architectural change in the SharePoint foundation, i.e., being built on top of ASP .NET 2.0 rather than in a side-by-side model as in WSS 2.0, provided the most significant performance benefit to the platform. This change facilitated the removal of the ISAPI filter from Internet Information Services (IIS) that glued SharePoint together with ASP.NET 1.1 and was the cause for a significant drag on the performance of any SharePoint 2.0 site.