Customized Sharepoint List Add/Edit page is slow to load

Question

I have a list with about 3000 items in it. The editing page is taking forever to load but the rest of the site is fast. I thought it had to do with having a Lookup column on the page and using the multiselect drop down but after replacing it, I am seeing no difference.

The page is about 118kb and take about 5 min to load.

Any ideas on how I can speed this up or go about figuring out the cause?

If you have suggestions for ASP.NET or IIS (recycle the app pool faster/slower?) changes please let me know.

Answer 1

Lists really shouldn't have that many items in them, as a best practice. I'd work for a way to refactor your lists into something more manageable for a start.

If you really must deal with this large of list, i'd look into output caching

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc298466.aspx

Answer 2

Have you opened the Add/Edit page in SharePoint Designer to see if it has been customized in some way? Maybe that will give you some clues.

You can always play around with indexes on your columns, but I don't see how that would help. The ID column used for Edit should be indexed automitically and they should have no effect for navigating to the Add screen.

Answer 3

When working with lists in SharePoint you should follow the best practices to ensure an acceptable performance. I don't think the issue you are experiencing is not caused by the number of items in the list, but rather on the limitations on the UI you are using for handling them (Add and Edit page).

If you need to use the Add and Edit page, you should stick to a limit of around 2000 items. You can always add additional folders to your list and in this way increase the number of items to hold in the list.

If you really need more items in a list, you should consider implementing your own UI for the list and query the results using SPQuery or using other methods. In this case you will not run into the same performance issues and could potentially hold 100.000+ items.

Microsoft has released a white paper with the results of a performance test for working with lists in SharePoint. Here is a link to the white paper called Working with large lists in Office SharePoint® Server 2007