The folks at Quest Software have written a white paper describing their top performance killers for SharePoint (registration required). It is worth summarizing the results here, for those of you that still use this tool and are getting complaints from your end users, or who haven’t looked at your storage requirements lately.
- Watch your BLOBs, as in binary large object storage. Everything that takes up lots of room in SharePoint, like documents or PDFs, ends up being stored in its underlying SQL Server database as a BLOB. “If versioning is turned on in the SharePoint environment, then each new version of a file requires a new BLOB, so a 10 MB PowerPoint presentation that has been altered 10 times takes up 100 MB of space even though it is just one file,” says the report. The best situation is to move these BLOBs to other environments. Microsoft offers two options: external BLOB storage and remote BLOB storage, and both are fairly new. You should take a look at what is involved in deploying both of them. Microsoft has said that they will continue to support remote BLOB storage in the future.
- Streaming videos can be an issue. “By their nature, media files are large – and they need to be retrieved fairly quickly.” Getting them out of a SharePoint repository might be taxing on your network bandwidth. Better to use a video sharing service and just put a link to them in your SharePoint repository.
- Clean out your old files. Quest says that “60-80%+ of content in SharePoint is unused or used only sparingly in its lifespan.” That is a lot of unused file storage that is hogging up your space. Time to do some house cleaning.
- Does it scale? If you have had your SharePoint installation for some time, you probably have it running on some underpowered hardware that needs review, particularly the disk storage system that you are using to support the application. “Microsoft recommends 2 IOPS per GB for optimal performance, so a 4 TB database needs 8000 IOPS. A common local SCSI array might deliver performance on the order of 200-300 IOPS.”
Of course, Quest has its own Storage Maximizer for SharePoint product that can help fix each of these issues, but even if you don’t consider their product, tracking down any of these problems is one way to help boost your Sharepoint performance and cut down on storage requirements.
