Sitecore 8.1- Language preformance issue - sitecore

While changing the language of an item, it is taking around 4-6 seconds for the choosen language to get reflected, that too for admin users. For non-admin, it is taking more than 8seconds which is causing a major performance issue. Kindly let me know how this issue can be resolved or atleast performance enhanced.

It would be worth you looking at the CMS Performance Tuning Guide and the CMS Diagnostics Guide they are for 7.x but I do not believe there are version 8.x equivalents at the moment and most of the advice will still be valid.
Also check the Fragmentation level of indexes on your master database and have a SQL maintenance plan in place to rebuild these as often as your environment requires it can really help performance.
Check the Sitecore Logs for errors during the slow periods and monitor all servers in your environment to see where the performance bottle neck is, CPU, memory etc..

Related

Sitecore 8.1 experience editor is very slow

We upgraded the sitecore from 7.2 to 8.1. Since the upgrade the content authors are complaining that the experience editor performance is much slower than previous version. It takes long time to load and also editing experience is very slow as well.
For now I've reverted back to SHEER UI version of experience editor by updating experienceeditor.config.
I read this blog post below but option 1 and 2 states "be aware that there are significant consequences...".
http://kamsar.net/index.php/2015/02/sitecore-8-experience-editor-performance-optimization/
Has any one experience this issue? And have any recommendation for the fix?
Thanks.
Reverting to SheerUI is probably an option you could consider... we know it works faster that the SPEAK UI, so it's a quick win to help out your content editors at the moment.
However Sitecore is moving towards SPEAK, and so I'm not sure how long the SheerUI interface will still keep up with the new features of the Experience Editor.
In addition to the pre-compilation of Views, you COULD attempt Kam's optimization, but as he mentioned, there could be significant issues that come about because of it.
I would also have a look into some other possibilities for speeding it up, like:-
Use the application cache to increase the performance of loading the
Experience Editor ribbon. - (https://doc.sitecore.net/Sitecore%20Experience%20Platform/The%20editing%20tools/Improve%20the%20performance%20of%20the%20Experience%20Editor%20ribbon)
Using ContentSearch instead of Fast Query for the 'My Items' count - (http://mikael.com/2015/12/speading-up-the-sitecore-experience-editor/), or even turning off the count altogether (http://sitecoreblog.alexshyba.com/hidden_gem_of_sitecore_page_editor/). UPDATE: Sitecore now has a Support DLL for this. (https://kb.sitecore.net/en/Articles/2015/12/04/14/31/549951.aspx)
Customize or even disable the SuggestedTestsCountRequest. - (http://blog.horizontalintegration.com/2015/07/05/sitecore8-experience-editor-slow/)

OpenEdge 11.3 Application Migration

We have an application with 10 millions lines of code in 4GL(Progress) and a database also OpenEdge with 300 Tables. My Boss says we should migrate it to a new Programming language and a new Database Management system.
My questions are:
Do you think we should migrate it? Do you think Progress has a "future"?
If we should migrate it, how, are there any tools? Or should we begin with programming from scratch?
Thank you for the help.
Ablo
Unless your boss has access to an unlimited budget, endless user patience and a thirst for frustration and agony you should not waste any time thinking about rewrites.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
Yes, Progress has a future. They probably will never be as sexy an option as Microsoft or Oracle or whatever the cool kids are using this week. But they have been around for 30 years and they will still be here when you and your boss retire.
There are those who will rain down scorn on Progress because it isn't X or it doesn't have Y. Maybe they can rewrite your 10 million lines of code next weekend and prove just how right they are. I would not, however, pay them for those efforts until after the user acceptance tests are passed and the implementation is completed.
A couple of years later (the original post being from 2014 and the answers being from 2014 to 2015) :
The post, which has gotten the most votes is argumenting basically two fold :
a. Progress (Openedge) has been around for a long time and is not going anywhere soon
b. Unless your boss has access to an unlimited budget, endless user patience and a thirst for frustration and agony you should not waste any time thinking about rewrites: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
With regard to a:
Yes, the Progress OpenEdge Stack is still around. But from my experience the difficulty to find experienced and skilled Openedge has gotten even more difficult.
But also an important factor here, which i think has evolved to much greater importance, since this discussion started:
The available Open Source Stacks for application development have gotten by factors better, both in terms of out-of-box functionality and quality and have decisively moved in direction of RAD.
I am thinking for instance of Spring Boot, but not only, see https://stackshare.io/spring-boot/alternatives. In the Java realm Spring Boot is certainly unique. Also for the development of rich Webui's many very valid options have emerged, which certainly are addressing RAD requirements, just some "arbitrary" examples https://vaadin.com for Java, but also https://www.polymer-project.org for Javascript, which are interestingly converging both with https://vaadin.com/flow.
Many of the available stacks are still evolving strongly, but all have making life easier for the developer as strong driver. Also in terms of architectures you will find a convergence of many of this stacks with regard basic building blocks and principles: Separation of Interfaces from Implementation, REST API's for remote communication, Object Relational Mapping Technologies, NoSql / Json approaches etc etc.
So yes the Open Source Stack are getting very efficient in terms of Development. And what must also be mentioned, that the scope of these stacks do not stop with development: Deployment, Operational Aspects and naturally also Testing are a strong ,which in the end also make the developers life easier.
Generally one can say the a well choosen Mix and Match of Open Source Stacks have a very strong value proposition, also on the background of RAD requirements, which a proprietary Stack, will have in the long run difficulty to match - at least from my point of view.
With regard to b:
Interestingly enough i was just recently with a customer, who is looking to do exactly this: rewrite their application. The irony: they are migrating from Progress to Progress OpenEdge, with several additional Open Edge compliant Tools. The reason two fold: Their code is getting very difficult to maintain and would refactoring in order to address requirements coming from Web Frontends. Also interesting, they are not finding enough qualified developers.
Basically: Code is sound and lives , when it can be refactored and when it can evolve with new requirements. Unfortunately there many examples - at least from my experience - to contrary.
Additionally End-of-Lifecyle of Software can force a company, to "rewrite" at least layers of their software. And this doesn't necessarily have to bad and impossible. I worked on a Project, which migrated over 300 Oracle Forms forms to a Java based UI within less then two years. This migration from a 2 tier to a 3 tier architecture actually positioned the company to evolve their architecture to address the needs of Web Ui's. So actually in the end this "rewrite" and a strong return of value also from the business perspective.
So to cut a (very;-)) long story short:
One way or another, it is easy to go wrong with generalizations.
You need not begin programming from scratch. There is help available online and yes, you can contact Progress Technical Support if you find difficulties. Generally, ABL code from previous version should work with only little changes. Here are few things that you need to do in order to migrate your application:
Backup databases
Backup source code and .r files
Truncate DB bi files
Convert your databases
Recompile ABL code and test
http://knowledgebase.progress.com articles will help you in this. If you are migrating from some older versions like 9, you can find a good set of new features. You can try them but only after you are done with your conversion.
If you are migrating from 32-bit to 64-bit and if you are using 32-bit libraries, you need to replace them with 64-bit
The first question I'd come back with is 'why'? If the application is not measuring up that's one thing, and the question needs to be looked at from that perspective.
If the perception is that Progress is somehow a "lesser" application development and operating environment, and the desire is only to move to a different development and operating environment - you'll end up with a lot of resources in time, effort, and money invested - not to mention the opportunity cost - and for what? To run on a different database platform? Will migrating result in a lower TCO? Faster development turn-around time? Quicker time to market? What's expected advantage in moving from Progress, and how long will it take to recover the migration cost - if ever?
Somewhere out there is a company who had similar thoughts and tried to move off of Progress and the ABL. The effort failed to meet their target performance and functionality metrics, so they eventually gave up on the migration, threw in the towel, and stayed with Progress - after spending $25M on the project.
Can your company afford that kind of risk / reward ratio?
Progress (Openedge) has been around for a long time and is not going anywhere soon. And rewriting 10 Million lines of code in any language just to use the current flavor of the month would never be worth it unless your current application is not doing what you need. Even then bringing it up to current needs would normally be a better solution.
If you need to migrate your current application to the latest version of Openedge (Progress) you would normally just make a copy of your database(s) and convert it/them to the new version of Openedge and compile your your code against the new databases and shake the bugs out. You may have some keyword issues, but this is usually pretty minor.
If you need help with programming I would suggest contacting Progress Software and attending the yearly trade show or going to https://community.progress.com/ and asking/looking for local user groups. The local user groups would be a stellar place to find local programming talent.
Hope this helps.....

How to choose server for production release of my Django application?

My company is at the very end of development process of some (awesome:)) web application. This app will be available as a online service for (hopefully) some significant number of users. This is our biggest django release so far and as we are preparing to release some question about deployment have to be answered.
Q1: how to determine required server parameters for predicted X number of users/Y hits per minute or other factor?
Q2: what hosting solution (shared/vps/dedicated) is worth considering?
Q3: what optimizations can be done at a first place?
I know that this is very subjective and dependent of size of a site, code quality and other factors but I'm very interested in your experiences with django (and not only django) deployment. Any hints, links, advices are kindly welcome. Thanks in advance.
What hosting solution you want to have depends also on how much you want to take of your server yourself (from upgrades etc to backup...), and you should decide if you want to have the responsibility or leave it to someone else.
I think you can only really determine the necessary requirements and bottlenecks in your applications through testing with the estimated load! Try to simulate as many requests.... as you expect - think about caching (where memcached is the best option you have)! If you try to cache things one great tool is the django debug toolbar (http://github.com/robhudson/django-debug-toolbar) which can show you also much about how many database hits you have (dont take the times it shows for that for granted, but analyse them and keep an eye on the number of hits) and eg. how many templates are rendered....
If your system grows, you can first of all think about serving your static media files from another location! Coming to the web server I have made great experiences using lighttpd instead of the fat apache, but I guess you have to evaluate that for yourself!
Also take in consideration what database backend to use, in shared envionments there's in most cases a bigger load on the mysql than on the postgres servers, but also evaluate what works best for you!
You can get some guesses here, but to get a halfway reasonable performance estimate you have to measure the performance of your application yourself. You should then be able to roughly extrapolate the performance on different hardware.
Most of the time the bottleneck is the database, you should get enough RAM to keep it in memory if possible.
"Web application" can encompass so many different things, we can really do no more than guess here.
As for optimization, if it fits to your needs implement some caching (e.g. with memchached), that can give you huge speed improvements.

How to setup Dotproject for software development projects?

I am assessing some tools to manage software develpment projects. Dotproject seems a good one, but i would like to learn of other's experinces using it for software development.
Thanks.
I've been using Assembla for a small team and loving it. The web interface is very elegant, and it gives me power and simplicity at the same time.
My favorite feature is the strong ticketing system which allows me to create tickets on the web, assign them to developers, associate them with other tickets, estimate the time it takes to close the ticket, and aggregate those times graphically. It really shines, though, with its version control and ticket integration. Being able to specify that this commit is related to ticket #45, fixes bug #78, and closes ticket #32 is very nice.
They offer version control hosting for multiple version control systems - including SVN and GIT.
They offer free and paid packages.
For more information, check out their usage videos here.
Oh, and do let us know what you decide and why :)
An old post, I know...
I used to be a core member of the dotproject team and used it for years and set up many organizations on it... ranging from small non-profits and software shops to major government projects. It tended to work relatively well. Unfortunately, due to the crawl of development, half the dotproject team split to form web2project and we've been there almost two years.
At present, we (web2project) does a quarterly release and have done major work on the code. We've closed ~100+ bugs, added dozens of features like iCal feeds, and improved performance by 95% and cut about 1/3 of the code overall. And yes, we have an upgrade path from dotProject.

Which web framework incurs the least overhead?

I'm playing around with Django on my website hosting service.
I found out that a simple Django page, which has only some static text, and is rendered from a very simple template I created takes a significant time to render. When compared to a static HTML page, I am getting ~2 seconds difference in the load times. Keep in mind this is a simple test of mine with nothing complicated. Also note that my web hosting is on a shared server (not dedicated), so I might be hitting some CPU limitations.
Seems to me that either:
I have some basic CGI/Apache/Django configuration wrong
Django takes significant overhead, at least in this specific scenario.
I find #1 not probable since I followed my web hosting service wiki on how to set up Django. So we are left with the overhead problem.
My question is which web framework do you find the best to use in scenarios where the website is hosted on a shared server, and CPU/memory overhead must be kept to minimum?
Edit: seems that my configuration is something I might want to look at, and perhaps later on I'll be opening a question on how to best configure Django.
For now, I would appreciate answers focusing on your experience, in general, with web frameworks, and which of those you found to be the best in terms of performance in the aforementioned scenario.
"I have some basic CGI/Apache/Django configuration wrong"
Correct.
First. The very first time Django returns a page, it takes forever. A lot of initialization happens for the first request.
Second. What specific configuration are you using. We just switched from mod_python to mod_wsgi in daemon mode and are very happy with the performance changes.
Third. What database are you using?
Fourth. What test configuration are you using?
Fifth. What caching parameters and reverse proxy are you using?
Odds are good that you have a lot of degrees of freedom in your configuration.
Edit
The question "which of those you found to be the best in terms of performance" is largely impossible to answer.
See http://wiki.python.org/moin/WebFrameworks
There are dozens of frameworks. Few people can examine more than a few to do head-to-head comparison.
The best possible performance is achieved through static content. A Python app that makes static pages (for instance a collection of Jinja templates) is fastest.
After that, it's largely impossible to say. Even http://werkzeug.pocoo.org/ involves some processing overheads that may be unacceptable in the above scenario. Python can be slow.
Django, with a modicum of effort, is often fast enough. Serving static content separately from dynamic content, for example, can be a huge speedup.
Since Django does so much automatically, there's a huge victory in not having to write every little administrative page.
I'd say there has to be something funky with your setup there to get such a large performance difference. Try mod_wsgi (if you're not already) and follow the excellent suggestions by the posters above. If Django genuinely was this slow in all cases, there's just no way companies would be able to use it for production applications. It's more than likely not to be Django that is holding the request up. Once you have the .pyc files all sorted (automatically generated bytecode), then the execution should be fairly zippy.
However, if you don't actually need all Django has to offer, then why use it? I'm using it in quite a large production application, and we're not using all of its features… if you're doing something fairly simple, you may want to consider using something like web.py or Werkzeug (or something non-Python-based if you'd rather).
Frameworks like Django or Ruby on Rails grew out of real world needs. As different as these needs were, as different they turned out.
Here is my Experience:
As a former PHP programmer, I prefered CakePHP for simple stuff and Symfony for more advanced applications. I had a look into Ruby, but the documentation sucked back then. Now I'm using Django. Django works very well for me. In contrast to Symfony I feel like Django brings less flexibility out of the Box, but its easier to extend.
Another approach would be to use 'no framework' CherryPy
I think the host may be an issue. I do Django development on my localhost (Mac) and it's way better. I like WebFaction for cheap hosting and Amazon ec2 for premium hosting.
The framework is strong and it can handle heavy sites - don't obsess about that stuff. The important thing is to create a clean product, Django can handle it. There are about a thousand steps to take when you see how the application handles in the wild, but for now, just trust us that you don't need to worry about the inherent speed of the framework before exhausting a whole slew of parameters including a dedicated VPS/instance when you need it.
Also, following on your edit - I personally don't think performance is a major issue in programming. Here are the issues in terms of concern:
UI/UX efficiency
UI/UX speed (application caching)
Well designed models/views
Optimization of the system (n-tier architecture, etc...)
Optimization of the process (good QA to reduce failures/bottlenecks from deployment)
Optimization of the subsystems (database, etc...)
Hardware
Framework internal optimization
Don't waste time with comparing framework speeds. Their advantage is in extensible code, smart architectures, etc...
On a side note, DO NOT NOT USE A FRAMEWORK FOR A NEW WEB APPLICATION. I'm sorry I can't say it loud enough, but it's an absolute requirement nowadays. It's not even a debate about not using one, just which one to use.
I personally chose Django, which is great. But I can't definitively knock the others out there.
It's possibly both. Django does have stuff for caching built-in, which would be worth trying. Regardless, any non-cached page will nearly always take longer than a static file. A file has to be read in both cases, and in the case of a dynamic page, it also must be executed. And then, in both cases, sent over to the client.
Definetely shared hosting is not the best choice to run heavy frameworks such as Django or CakePHP. If you can afford it, buy VPS.
As for performance, probably your host uses Python with mod-python, which is not recommended now. WSGI is preferred standard for Python powered webapps.