Optimizing Sitecore CM Performance: A comprehensive guide

This article covers all angles of performance improvement on the Sitecore content authoring (CM/CA) application:

1. Service tier configuration:

• Adjust Database sizes if DB responses lag, Monitor DTUs

• Increase app service tiers if the performance issues aren't with the application, they might be due to the weak infrastructure. Scale the application infrastructure horizontally or vertically based on the architecture.

• Monitor SOLR physical memory (RAM, JVM and ROM) on the SOLR dashboard, and increase the service tier of the SOLR infrastructure accordingly.

2. Schedulers:

• Revisit the index update strategies for each of your indexes and see if they are filling up the load on the application. Modify the update strategies for ideal usage of the indexing operations.

• Re-visit the publishing schedules, if any. As a thumb rule, Change the publish type from "Smart" to "Incremental" for improved publishing performance.

3. Content optimization:

• Limit number of items in folders. Folders/Content nodes with over 100 child-items hinder authoring performance.

• Optimize queries on template fields, in case you have Sitecore fast queries on your templates. Heavy queries highly impact item-to-item navigation in Sitecote.

• Example of a heavy query : query:/sitecore/content//*[@@templateid = '{BF34945B-BBDC-44BF-B15D5DA156455726}'. Queries like this take an extremely long time to complete and impact the authoring performance.

• Create branch templates for easy complex item node creations.

• Use optimized template field types. For example, the field types Treelist and TreelistEx essentially fo the same job. But, TreelistEx type is superior to Treelist in terms of performance

• Limit item versions. Over time, Sitecore items acquire hundreds of versions at times. https://marketplace.sitecore.net/Modules/V/Version_Manager is a tool that helps scraping and managing Sitecore versions.

• Monitor broken links and reconcile periodically.

• Optimize heavy workflow actions. Workflow actions include sending emails to authors or publishing while item is approved, etc,.

4. Clean-up agent configurations:

• Physical data include log files, media cache files, etc,.

• Set up clean up agent configurations to periodically delete

1. Application logs (General logs, publishing, crawling, custom logs, etc,.)

2. Media indexing data

3. Device detection data

• Set up event queue and publishing queue clean ups. These queues potentially impact overall performance of the application.

• Optimize cache sizes of caches that impact the authoring application (ex. Access result cache, prefetch caches on master and core, master[data], core[items], etc.)

  
  

5. Optimize custom logics:

• Optimize content operations that you might be doing on Sitecore items.

• For example, methods like selectitems(), GetAncestors() and GetDescendants() might have impact on performance if made to manipulate excessive amount of data.