Tag: performance

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Archive/Restore Options for Sitecore

versions

There are many legally obligated companies that would still pick Sitecore for it’s immense power and flexibility that comes out of the box and the constant push towards reaching marketing goals is one of the other main reason why.

The biggest challenges they are facing currently is the legal battles these heavy financial companies face to maintain old/stale data for compliance reasons.  Even if they have a third party crawler of some sort that would capture screenshots of how sites are rendered at scheduled times, due to Personalization and other contextual driven content, they do need some way to tap on to all history and can not risk loosing it for Audit purposes.

I have seen some clients that kept storing all versions in all languages which would lead to bad performance of content editor and slow content authoring experience.  Sitecore recommends not more than 10 versions to be stored on CM side.

I have been researching to find few decent options to steer them to correct path which is to trim their versions.  I must say that I could not find next to none which are robust and easy to use, especially that utilize Sitecore Archiving instead of Serialization to a item file on file system.  I sure found couple blogs and references to build something, but, it would be nice to have feature which would be harnessed and appreciated by most of the audit heavy clients.

Would love to get some feedback and tools you all typically use for Archiving the outdated Item versions.  Do note that this should work on a load balanced CM environment. 🙂

Looking forward to hear any feedback on this, I currently, based on research out there found three options overall and I am listing down pros and cons on each.  But, if any of you know more, please reach out.

Option 1 – Manual Route

Sitecore provides manual way for content author to archive versions on need basis and there is a UI that could be utilized to restore the version of choice.

https://doc.sitecore.net/sitecore_experience_platform/82/content_authoring/managing_items/general/archive_and_restore_an_item

Option 2 – Custom with a Twist

The Guru, John west, has a blog that is neat and could help with a solution that could be custom built.

https://community.sitecore.net/technical_blogs/b/sitecorejohn_blog/posts/rules-engine-actions-to-remove-old-versions-in-the-sitecore-asp-net-cms

Also, I did find a module that took inspiration from option 3 that is coming next and blog provided above, but, unfortunately it does not support multi-lingual at this time and customization would be needed to be able to use the same.

Introducing the ‘Sitecore Version Pruner’ shared source module!

Option 3 – The Legacy Module (Version Manager)

https://marketplace.sitecore.net/en/Modules/Version_Manager.aspx

If you have ever read through performance tuning document, Sitecore did recommend on versions 7 to have in version manager to help mitigate number of versions.

FYI, currently due to lack of time, the module is not being actively maintained per author’s comment, but, it could be tested and utilized if your business demands are satisfied.  But, do note that this uses file serialization mechanism for restoration and archiving, so, it would be tedious to restore and not as straight forward as Archiving that is possible on later versions of Sitecore.

 

I had created sitecore support ticket to find out if there is more that I can quickly go ahead and use and the answer was no, so, they created a feature request, would love to get this ticket escalated.  If you wish to track it, here is the number – 198728

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Performance is the Key

Imagine yourself building an excellent functional website, but, it does not load fast enough, would people actually use the awesome functionality you pulled off.  The answer would be no! People are impatient and busy with their hectic lives and they would not care to wait 3 seconds that the functionality might take to load.  So, performance is a balancing act to make wise decisions when coming to impeccable functionality.  Asking the right questions and following the best practices around everything as much humanely or scope wise possible is the way to to go and key to success.  In the past, i did write a blog about performance gain in few steps which was more web site page load speed driven.  You can see it here

A different paradigm to bump up your site performance

This time around, I will highlight few key things you could do in improvising your Content management experience.

When building a sitecore site, considering the routine and daily chores of content author are the most important to ensure we are using full potential of what Sitecore has to offer with it’s platform.  But, often times this is forgotten along the way and more attention is given to how the website looks, feels and functions.  It is important to ensure the content author experience is still taken in to consideration while pulling off an amazing looking site.

Couple things to keep in mind while coming up with Architecture and Sitecore content structure for the site –

  1. Placeholder settings
  2. Insert Options
  3. Experience editor support
  4. Available renderings
  5. Compatible Renderings
  6. Standard Values

I will drill more on to how each of the above when thought and configured correctly would be of great help to ensure content author has seamless experience.  For now, jumping on to performance.   I have seen many folks complain that their content authoring is slow and sometimes take a while to load.  This could be due to customization done, but, we should not forget to try the below things first to ensure we have basic foundations covered.   They do not take long time to do, but, could be that it is often given least importance because again end user experience is given more weight  than content author experience. 🙂

Below is the drill that could be done to instantly bump up your content author experience.

  • Clean up Databases :  It should be either done regularly via control panel or a script that could be scheduled to run from SQL server to help mitigate performance issues.
  • Maintenance Plans: Sitecore performance tuning guide screams that this is important, it is simple to do, but, I noticed this is almost always ignored and not done.  This is important and critical for content authoring performance
  • Ensure there are less than 100 items within a node, this is a best practice suggested by sitecore, so, the content author does not click on expand and wait few seconds before he see’s the list load.
  • Few critical settings that could help content tree load would be those mentioned on performance tuning document, below are the two for reference, both have good gain of performance
    RenderCollapsedSections
    CheckHasChildrenOnTreeNodes
    Check tuning guide for more information:  https://sdn.sitecore.net/upload/sitecore7/70/cms_tuning_guide_sc70-72-usletter.pdf
  • Limit number of versions: User version manager to ensure you have upper bound to number of versions on your implementation.
  • Ensure workbox and draft versions are cleaned up frequently for better maintenance and quicker load.
  • Clean  up broken links
  • Rebuild your indexes
  • Use publishing service if you are on newer versions of sitecore.
  • Go cloud – So, nearest available node would serve the content avoiding any network delay
  • Ensure you set cache limits and not use limitless cache option that sitecore provides on CM
  • Check your logs for any errors and fix them.

After doing all the above, if your content authoring is still slower then look into any overridden code in Sitecore pipelines and do some performance tests.

Happy Sitecoring and Have a great weekend!