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Performance issues on Sitecore CM server

Hi,

So our content authors and testers started reporting that they are getting more and more Page Unresponsive Error dialog appear while working on CM server. They also reported that there were often long waits during edit and save operations.

So, I started investigating this and jumped into Sitecore logs to dig out the root cause. I had interesting observations -

  1. Created pages in Experience editor and did not encounter any issues during normal editing actions.
  2. Created a copy of medium sized folder in site (e.g. /sitecore/content/<SiteName>/<Test Folder Path> and recycled it later. On both the actions, Page Unresponsive error was reproducible and all subsequent requests from Sitecore client kept waiting. This confirmed a large copy/delete/publish operation consumes most of the resources available for SQL operations and other users get blocked.
  3. Analyzed the logs for last few weeks and found that the following activities happened around same timestamp whenever the performance issue on CM was reported -
    • Item publish
    • Index rebuild/updates
    • User session log outs
    • Long running operations in Sitecore e.g. logs like –
      • DEBUG Long running operation: Running Validation Rules
      • DEBUG Long running operation: GetContentEditorWarningsArgs pipeline
      • DEBUG Long running operation: renderContentEditor pipeline[id={11111111-1111-1111-1111-111111111111}]
      • DEBUG Long running operation: getChromeData pipeline
    • Unnecessary Jobs running in background e.g. IndexingStateSwitcher running every 1 minute

 

Potential Causes and fixes-

  1. Many of our custom indexes working on master database used syncMaster strategy for index rebuild/update. SyncMaster strategy re-indexes updated data immediately after various events in CM. It adds advantage of almost real time indexing but syncMaster is the most expensive indexing strategy in terms of machine resources and should only be used in limited circumstances. Any large or frequent item operations in CM will impact CM performance. We shall limit syncMaster to limited indexes only and use strategies like intervalAsync strategy for other indexes.
  2. Long running operations reported in Sitecore logs need analysis. One of the most occurring long running operation is - Running Validation Rules.
  3. Sitecore jobs running in background need tuning and unnecessary jobs can be killed.
  4. It appears that during actions like publishing, index updates or bulk item processing, the CPU processes keep waiting for SQL operations to complete and CPU utilization shoots to 85% plus which causes page unresponsive issue. We may have to increase SQL resources.

 I will keep updating this page with my observations. Thanks for reading :)

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