sharepoint hardware recommendation for public sites

Question

Hi We have built 2 web sites on MOSS 2007 which have many customizations on pages and many ajax web parts.

Currently one of the sites is live and the configuration is as follows

Web server

Xeon 4 core processor 12 GB RAM 50 GB harddisk

SQL Server

Xeon 4 core processor 16 GB RAM 150 GB disk space

Servers are deployed as virtual machines on VMWare.

The live site is in test and it is open to public users and there are 1000 unique users per day for the site.

The problem is, the site is too slow and we are planning to put 11 web sites on the same configuration one of which will be a very popular site which we plan that 10000-15000 unique visitors per day.

What may be the problem ? Is this configuration too low for the current site and how can we plan for a configuration for the future projects ?

Answer 1

If you are expecting more than 15k unique users please follow the Large farm topology for sharepoint Kindly find more details here Physical topology

Answer 2

Off course, following best practices and physical topoly is a sound procedure!

Howeever just saying your sites are slow isn't saying to much at all. Did you look at all the slowlyness reasons, try hit F12 in IE8 or IE9 and look for network time for instance. How is your code performing? Could there be any other cause for slowlyness? how did you configure your virtual network settings?

Looking at your Hardware rightnow, this looks certainly reasonable for its job. How did you configure backend SQL Dbase, is it running on fiber, ISCSI (and if so on what kind?)

did you perform IO testing on both machines during a period of time? what are the outcomes of this? just saying it's slow doesn't say anything without knowing more detail. start with F12 in Ie8 and go on from there , try and look for the things that waist time, be it code or hardware IO holding the performance down.

DID you know Microsoft isn't advising hyperthreading on server machines in combination with SharePoint!