Top 10 Secrets for Speeding up SharePoint WebSitesDerek Watson

CTO, Aptimize Software

derek.watson@aptimize.com

Agenda

• You have 5 seconds• Performance Methodology• Top 10 secrets• How we did it: sharepoint.microsoft.com• Resources

You Have 5 Seconds

• You have five seconds to make an impact– Engage interest, or leave forever– google.com

• 100 ms delay = 20% less searches

– shopzilla.com: • 25% reduction in load time• 7%-12% revenue increase

– findsomeone.co.nz• 25% reduction in load time• 13% more clicks per visitor

– Google recently announced that speed will affect search rankings

Performance Methodology

Methodology• Goal: 5 seconds or less• Measure• Improve• Measure

What can we change?• Hardware• Platform• Application

Understanding Website Speed

• Waterfall Diagram– Breaks down page load– Shows everything to

load the page

• Create diagram using– WebPageTest– Fiddler

Sample Waterfall Diagram

• Server vs. Client time

Sample Waterfall Diagram

• Server vs. Client time

Sample Waterfall Diagram

• Server vs. Client time

Sample Waterfall Diagram

• Server vs. Client time

TOP 10 SECRETS

1: Hardware + Platform

• Buy good hardware– Dedicated SQL Server– Web Cluster– SCSI RAID– Lots of RAM– Multiple CPUs

• SQL Server– Sizing + tuning + indexing– Blob cache

Goal: Server processing < 1 second

Warning: No secrets here

2. Far-Future Expires

Reduce repeat-view load times 50%+ • Browser caches resources• Doesn’t check again until expiry• Reduces HTTP requests 90%• Challenge: Refreshing changes

Code: Add This HTTP Header to each resource

Expires: Wed, 13 Oct 2010 04:02:35 GMT

3. Gzip Compression

Reduce first view load time 30%-40%• Reduces size:

– HTML– JavaScript– StyleSheets

• No effect on images: (JPEG, PNG, GIF)

Check for HTTP request header

Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate

4. Optimize JavaScript

Reduce load time 7%-10%• Merge JavaScript files into single file• Shrink JavaScript

– Remove comments– Remove whitespace

• Challenges:– Preserving functionality– Maintenance

5. Optimize StyleSheets

Reduce start render up to 75%• Merge StyleSheets into single file• Shrink CSS in StyleSheet• Place StyleSheet at beginning of HTML• Page render starts after all StyleSheets are

loaded• Challenges:

– Maintenance

6. Image Sprites

Reduce load 5%-15%• Merge images into

multi-image sprite• Change HTML to use

sprite• HTTP requests

reduced• Challenges:

– Maintaining the sprite– Changing HTML

7. Image Inlining

• Reduce load times 1%-10%• Base64 encode CSS background images• Embed encoded data into CSS file• Reduces HTTP requests• Challenges

– Maintainability– Browser compatibility

8. Reduce external references

• Reduce ads and syndication– Ads – YouTube videos– Links to external sites

• Each link opens a new connection– Each increases load time ≈ 0.5 seconds

• Solution:– Load at the end of page– Load in an iframe

9. Flash and Silverlight

• Don’t use– Flash on home page– Silverlight on home page

• Both add– Load time– Start render time

LOADING… 15%

10. Security

• Use Kerberos instead of NTLM– Reduces HTTP 401 network traffic – Requires extra configuration in AD

• Only use SSL where you really need it– Consumes CPU cycles– Content not cacheable

DEMO: MEASUREMENT TOOLS

Sharepoint.microsoft.com

Challenge• Improve performance for

microsoft.com site• High traffic, no downtime

Applied Methodology• Used 10 techniques

Results• > 50% reduction in load time

"The improvement in page loading time is tremendous."

Tony Tai, Product Manager, Microsoft Corporation

Aptimize Website Accelerator

Aptimize software automates best practices for browser load times

Aptimize Doubles Website Speeds:

Reduces HTTP requests by merging CSS and JS files

Reduces images with CSS sprite and CSS inlining

Compresses content using minification + Gzip

Increases caching using far-future-expires

50% reduction in data traffic and load times

40% increase in server throughput

Used in over 300 websites and intranets

Next Steps

• Website speed is front and center now• Increase your service level• Steps:

– Measure your site now– Apply 10 steps– Measure your site– Get connected to blogs, Linked-in, Twitter

Get Connected

• Blog– http://www.aptimize.com/blog

• Twitter– http://twitter.com/aptimize

• LinkedIn (search Groups Aptimize)– http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2294848

&trk=myg_ugrp_ovr

Resources

WebPageTest http://www.webpagetest.org

Fiddler http://www.fiddler2.com

Visual Round-Trip Analyzer

http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=119f3477-dced-41e3-a0e7-d8b5cae893a3

Microsoft case study http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/09/28/how-we-did-it-speeding-up-sharepoint-microsoft-com.aspxIAB guidelines http://www.iab.net/media/file/IAB_Ad_Load_Perfomance_BP_FINAL.pdf