Performance and Capacity planning guidance for SharePoint 2010

Following white papers and case studies have been published recently on the Microsoft Download Center to provide guidance on performance and capacity planning for SharePoint 2010. That's 300+ pages of information to digest!! Nice way to spend next few weeks :-)
1) SharePoint Server 2010 performance and capacity test results and recommendations -  describe the performance and capacity impact of specific feature sets included in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010:

• Access Services
• Large Lists
• Divisional Portal
• InfoPath
• Performance Point Services
• Search
• Word Automation Services (WAS)
• Web Content Management (WCM)
• Workflow

2) Capacity management and sizing for SharePoint Server 2010 - helps you determine the appropriate capacity for your Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 environment. This white paper provides you with the information that helps you:

• Understand the concepts behind effective capacity management
• Define performance and capacity targets for your environment
• Select the appropriate data architecture
• Choose hardware to support the number of users and the features you intend to deploy
• Test, validate, and adjust your environment to achieve your performance and capacity targets
• Monitor and adjust your environment to match demand

3) SharePoint Server 2010 capacity management: software boundaries and limits - provides information to help you understand the tested performance and capacity limits of SharePoint Server 2010, and offers guidelines for how limits relate to acceptable performance. Use this info to determine whether your planned deployment falls within acceptable performance and capacity limits, and to properly configure limits in your environment.

4) SharePoint Server 2010 performance and capacity technical case studies - Technical case studies that describe specific deployments of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. Compare the scenarios in these documents to your planned workload and usage characteristics. If your planned design is similar, you can use the documented deployment as a starting point for your own installation.

SharePoint site are slow intermittently: SharePoint 2010.

Issue: We have been experiencing intermittent slowness on the SharePoint Farm.

Background: We are getting intermittent partial outage on the SharePoint Farm. We have assigned dedicated set of WFE’s for different set of web applications and all of sudden without any alert or alarming, user started reporting that SharePoint is taking long time to load or its keep on clocking. Lead time for the sites is min 3-5 min.

Troubleshooting:

We have checked if this issue is occurring for an individual user. It was happening for the large number of groups and people and not region specific.

We have checked on the specific server and sites are slow on the web servers as well.

We have checked on the SAAS, SCOM Alerts and Site Scope system from HP, however, no alert was triggered.

No blocking reported on the SQL server.

From server Event logs we only see an error message that “Cannot connect to SQL Server .”

Temporary Resolution: As a temporary resolution we had recycled the app pool on the webserver running that applications and it worked fine. However, I was not sure that there would be a huge service destruction coming in the next coming day.

You know what; this issue started occurring three to four times a day. And recycling app pool was not the correct choice always.

Permanent Resolution: So one day we have decided to involve the SQL Team as we see from the Event Logs that we get an Error message “Cannot connect to SQL ”.

Based on the MS analysis, we saw there were so many page latches on the TEMP DB by running the sys.dm_os_latch_stats and see what type of latches have increased contention and wait types, compared to previous base-line.

MS recommended splitting the 20 GB of Temp DB in smaller chunks. We divided Temp DB in 5 GB in size with 4 Databases on each SQL Server we have in the farm.

KB Article which support this resolution: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307487.

Reference:

Diagnosing and Resolving Latch Contention on SQL Server: http://www.microsoft.com/en-in/download/details.aspx?id=26665

What is the temp Database: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms190768.aspx

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15131021/sql-server-2005-investigate-what-caused-tempdb-to-grow-huge.

If you have any queries/questions regarding the above mentioned information then please let me know.

I would be more than happy to help you as well as resolves your issues, thank you.

Applies to:  SharePoint Foundation Server 2010, SharePoint 2010, SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008.