Performance problem: SharePoint site is very slow

Performance Problem:

SharePoint 2010 Server site and Central Admin are unrealistically too slow (16 seconds or more) to open in browser, without showing any error. You added much more server hardware resources (CPU, RAM and HDD) but this solution fails to improve performance.

Analysis:

In IE, hit F12 key and found that the site home page took 73 seconds to load!

In Central Admin, click on the Health Analyzer to find an interesting item in the performance section: “Application pools recycle when memory limits are exceeded.”

According to this Microsoft article here:

Application pools recycle because memory limits have been enabled and exceeded. Recycling based on memory limits is not usually necessary in a 64-bit environment, and therefore recycling should not be enabled. Unnecessary recycling can result in dropped requests from the recycled worker process and slow performance for end users who are making requests to the new worker process.

In faulty server -> IIS Manager -> Application Pools -> select the ‘SharePoint – 80' -> right-click -> click Recycling. We see the following 2 values:

·         Virtual memory usage (in KB): is checked to use 1024 KB

·         Private memory usage (in KB): is checked to use 1024 KB

Cause:

Apparently the application pool (SharePoint – 80) is recycling each time it reaches the memory limit as set above to 1024 KB. This happens many times during page loading so the total time needed to load the page is too long.

Solution:

Follow this procedure:

1.   Current user account must be a member of the Farm Administrators group.

2.   Identify the failing server(s) and repeat the following steps on each failing server

[Central Administration -> Monitoring -> click Review problems and solutions, and then find the name of the server in the Failing Servers column, example: SharePoint - 80].

3.   Current user account must be a member of the Local Administrators group on each server in step 2 above.

4.   In faulty server -> IIS Manager -> Application Pools -> select the ‘SharePoint – 80' -> right-click -> click Recycling. Clear the 2 check boxes of Virtual memory usage (in KB) and Private memory usage (in KB) -> click Next -> click Finish. (Repeat this step for all AppPools of slow WebApps).

Open the site again, and now it’s really fast!