The traffic to the FanGap network keeps increasing and yet DNN just hums away without any issues. Check out the  latest current anonymous users count:

This machine is a dual CPU quad core processor and as you can see resources are hardly being pegged on the server:

Our average response time is under 1 second.

How is this accomplished? It is due to the fact that ASP.NET is a mature technology, there is nothing inherit in DNN that gets us to this point other than proper coding methods. The core team did wonders in the 4 release when they cleaned up the code to increase the performance of DNN and this proves that.

Still there are some things you can do in order to squeeze performance out of your infrastructure when running a DNN site:

• Use module caching where you can - avoid hitting the database as much as possible. This is the main bottleneck having to go over the network and access your database server.
• SQL Server - By far the most important part of optimizing your DNN site. Make sure your database server is optimized as much as possible by splitting out the database from the logs, and increasing the amount of tempdbs so they equal the amount of processors. There are definitely other tweaks I find that helps like switching logging over to simple recovery since I do not need point in time recovery in the event of failure. Also make sure you perform maintenance your databases periodically to ensure it runs to the fullest efficiency.
• Compression - maximize your network pipe and use compression!
• Caching - This is caching of the page. I set this to heavy and also set the IIS settings to cache pages for a day. This will tell the client not to hit my web server for pages that do not change often. Plan out your caching strategy and you can save loads.
• Basic HTML Design Rules - minimize image size, optimize your pages in every way possible.
• Page Blaster - I definitely use Snapsis Page Blaster, it helps tremendously by caching the entire page and not module by module. You should check it out.

Those are some that come to mind, keep an eye on your infrastructure and you can hum your DNN implementation along with 100 concurrent users using only 1 web server and 1 SQL box.

For more information on DNN optimization or running DNN in a web farm contact us today!