Performance Testing Check List

Rough Notes

Performance Factors Checklist:

1. Geography and networking - Australia and Africa users always tend to have issues regardless of the centralized SharePoint farms they are accessing.  Poor networking especially in remote satellite offices is not a SharePoint issue but as enterprise grow these are the pains they need to work out.
2. Security and network design
3. Usage patterns (Working with documents in the UK after noon when the US comes online may have a peak usage rate 5 times higher than when Australia starts in the morning)
4. Functionality (Search is heavier than displaying a static web page)
5. Application design (too many web services calls when 1 can do all the calls) and application implementation.  The application needs to meet the functional and non-functional requirements.  Coding error creep in, implementation needs to meet the design and unnecessary code improved.
6. Platform (2 server VM farm will only get a set load no matter how well it is tweeked)

Figure out where the bottlenecks are and how big the impact is:

• SQL is a common performance bottle neck, check you have optimized SQL
• Monitor all server in your farm, the random, throw more RAM at the solution is pointless most of the time.
• Size of lists in SP
• Size of Content
• Physical architecture
• Search - design, how many items are crawled are they all needed, multiple search farms, what is going on, AD groups preferential to individual users
• WAN latency Testing
• Baseline SP testing
• Peak loads and what is affected (Monitor and prove where the issues are).  Concurrency and usage patterns.
• Archiving, document retention, document versioning, unwanted general storage area, recycle bin, can we clean up
• Optimize highly used page - for example if your home page leverages search and the search service and farm is therefore under load, more the search component into a cached solution or pull off the home page.
• Auditing logs - Do you log enough, do you log too much can you pull them out of the Content DB and store them elsewhere.
• Encryption (TDE, SSL, Devices)
• Web page basics: image size, CDNs, JavaScript optimisation, sprites