SharePoint - "Request Timed Out"

Question

Hi,

Anyone got tips for diagnosing SharePoint / ASP.Net "Request Timed Out" messages?

We've recently taken on the support and development of a client's MOSS public facing website. We've recreated a version of the site (a manual process - no Solution's here!) on 3 separate dev servers and are experiencing extremely slow warmup times. I'm used to waiting up to a minute after an IIS Reset but we are having to go through 2 Asp.Net "Request Timed Out" error messages. In general the site seems to be taking about 5 minutes to load up. Try doing custom development against that!

The strange thing is that on the staging and production servers the site takes about 40 seconds to warm up. They are slightly more powerful servers with a separate DB server but I wouldn't have thought the difference should be that great? I don't have any trouble with other SharePoint sites on my dev servers - just this one. It does contain a lot of custom code and DLLs so I understand that it may take a little longer to load these up but 5 minutes seems ridiculous.

The servers I'm testing this on are SharePoint 2007 (Feb CU), Win2003/IIS6, SQL 2005.

Does anyone have any tips for diagnosing the bottleneck here? I'm not sure if this is expected behaviour or a problem somewhere in the stack?

Cheers, James.

Answer 1

Have you run any performance monitoring over the servers? This is essential for finding where the bottlenecks are. See here and here for recommendations.

If custom code has been deployed, check for an unusually high exception count or garbage collection/memory leak problems. This is most likely to be where the problem is. The best way to narrow this down is with a tool such as ANTS Profiler which will show memory leaks and performance issues. You could also Turn on ASP.NET tracing and set debug="true" in web.config and get some idea on slow executing code (although with all those timeouts this might not be so helpful).

Also do you know if any regular maintenance was performed on the SQL Server? (See some tips here.) Has SharePoint SP2 been installed (this performs some reindexing for you)?