How many files do you have in RedDot?

[Kelly]

Anyone willing to share # of files in your RedDot site? And # of
images? Verizon: this includes you guys!

I am getting a lot of concerns about "why does this $%*&ing RedDot
product run so darn slooooow?!?" My answer is (in part) the site is
seriously huge....

Our stats:
338 total users / 21,000 web pages (5.75 GB) / 13,266 images (4.01
GB) / Company type: Non-profit

We are essentially hosting 70 websites in 1 single project. Due to
project requirements this was the only way to go (and we consulted
plenty of vendors beforehand).

Currently it can take up to *18 seconds* just to open the TASKS
button. Everyone feels this should be opening in 2-3 seconds max.
But from what I'm reading on this forum, that time is not too bad
(altho I'd love to speed it up!)

Any ideas? Anyone willing to share website stats?

Thanks!
Kelly
kellybu...@gmail.com

[Henry Lu, Sun Certified Java Programmer]

Hi Kelly,

I remember reading somewhere in a RedDot doc that a single server
normally reaches capacity when the page instances approach 12K. But I
do not remeber where I came across with it.

But that does nto really matter anyway, you've suceeded in putting 21K.

Other than going for the clustering option, the only thing I can think
of to speed things up would be as follows:

1) Beef up the RAM on the machine.
2)If you have lists that contain more than 500 pages attached to a
single one, you do need to break it down into s few separate lists.
Lists with large numbers derived pages are the usual suspects in
slowing things down.

Henry Lu

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Henry Lu
e-mail: java...@gmail.com
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[Frederic Hemberger]

OMG ... I think you just broke the RedDot project-size world record.
70 websites of that size in one single project ... I never want to be
in the place of your administrator, that's for sure! ;)

There are several things you could do:
- Split the project!! It will be A LOT easier to handle, especially if
something breaks. You can use content class/folder sharing if all
websites need access to the same ressources.
- Use a cluster with physical(!) machines for editing and machines for
publishing and divide the users between these machines to compensate
peaks in parallel editing. Don't use virtualized servers.
- Which RedDot version are you using? Versions between 7.5.1.31 and .
91 had some serious performance and cluster issues.

[Smith Paul (SLH)]

Ouch! That's a lot of files and sites in one project!

We've been having speed issues here and our projects are no-where near
that big. One of the things we did to improve performance was, within
smartEdit and preview views only, bring all the css and js files inline
rather than separate files. This reduces the number of items reddot has
to pick up each time you look at a page.

This won't solve your main problem though ;)

Paul

Thanks!
Kelly
kellybu...@gmail.com

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[Frederic Hemberger]

After thinking about it for some time, I came up with this:
http://blog.markusgiesen.de/2008/07/15/how-to-avoid-finding-yourself-in-the-middle-of-a-reddot-project-apocalypse/

I hope these ideas are some help for people dealing with huge projects.

[Java Hand]

Hi Freddie,

Good one. Talking about splitting a project into many, RedDot CMS actually
comes with cap on the number of "live" projects one server can have.

Do you happen to know how that works? When one reaches the limit, can one go
to RedDot and ask to lift that cap?

Henry Lu

[Frederic Hemberger]

Hi Henry,

> Do you happen to know how that works? When one reaches the limit, can one go
> to RedDot and ask to lift that cap?

Well, it's actually not that easy: Besides just a calling reddot, you
have to pay the license fee for the increased number of projects. Then
they will be more than happy to provide you a new license key which
you just have to copy & paste into your current CMS installation. ;)


Regards,
Frederic

[Marc Grynberg]

> Good one. Talking about splitting a project into many, RedDot CMS actually
> comes with cap on the number of "live" projects one server can have.

You can also split in multiple projects but group sites... you don't
need to have a 1 to 1 ratio...
In our case, we have a global site and over a hundred much smaller
country sites.
The main project that contains the global siteis just impossible to
split for production reasons, but the country sites are distributed in
projects by geographical region.
You can almost always find a grouping criteria for your sites and use
that to group them into smaller projects...
Then with content class sharing and (if needed) cross project
references (yay RD 7.5) you can make the thing act most likely the way
you need...

Marc

[Kelly]

Hi guys - Thanks for all the great responses! VERY very helpful!!

We run CMS 6.5 on 3 clustered servers with 1 seperate publishing
server. All physical boxes, no virtual servers.

We've had RedDot Professional Services here twice to maximize
performance but it still feels slow to users.

They hate waiting the 16 seconds it takes for their TASKS button to
cough up a page. It does seem like a very long time when you are used
to the web world - where clicking a link = INSTANT action.

But it sounds like from this and other posts here that our RedDot
delay time is relatively speedy considering the size of our project.

We did a 'test run' upgrading to 7.5 but it was miserably slow (really
non functional) so we had to reschedule our 7.5 upgrade. We learned a
lot from these posts about the 7.5 performance issues others were
experiencing, which matched our own.

Dividing the project into multiple projects (and multiple users per
server) could be done - but since we have a TON of cross project
referencing, that would be a big project to implement, and would
require 7.5.

The other thing we have is a TON of ASP customization. Every single
page is based off of session variables and populates the elements
based on what is found in the session variables. RDExecute on every
page = slower site.

I often wonder if this coulda/shoulda been done in a different product
(something like LiveServer or even something other than RedDot)???

Would love to know others feedback on that. Our website if you are
curious to check out the project is: http://www.ALZ.org

We hear 8.0 is suppposed to be rebuilt from the ground up and much
MUCH better in terms of performance than 6.5 or 7.5 was.

Anyone know how 'true' that is?

Thanks again for the great posts!

Kelly

[Gavin Cope]

Just regarding the slow times on opening the Tasks window. That was well known in CMS 6.5 and a big gripe by people working in big projects. CMS 7.5 rewrote the search interface and used this for the Tasks functionality and the speed problems should have disappeared (which is what we've found in our implementations). So not sure why you're upgrade ended in a slower system.
But you are right in what you say, masses of pre-executed ASP slows down the system a LOT. It's entirely possible that LiveServer may have been a better solution in some instances. But then you've got a whole new kettle of fish to worry about :)

Cheers,

Gavin

2008/7/18 Kelly <KellyBu...@gmail.com>:

[Frederic Hemberger]

> We run CMS 6.5 on 3 clustered servers with 1 seperate publishing
> server. All physical boxes, no virtual servers.

Have you tried to increase the caches? (Has to be done in a
configuration file, not via the backend.) Or increased script caching
in the project settings? Normally, a script caching time like 10 to 60
miunutes works fine on productive environments.

> We've had RedDot Professional Services here twice to maximize
> performance but it still feels slow to users.

Maybe THAT was part of the problem instead of the solution. *fg*

> The other thing we have is a TON of ASP customization.  Every single
> page is based off of session variables and populates the elements
> based on what is found in the session variables.  RDExecute on every
> page = slower site.

Uhh, so it seems to be an issue as well HOW the project was built. A
major performance increasement could be minifying executed scripts in
the Smart Edit view. Try to execute ASP scripts only in page preview
and published pages. Same is true for javascript: I had a customer
which used flash movies in SmartEdit and was annoyed of the loading
time of approx. 8 seconds per page. After limiting the flash output to
preview/publishing, it dropped to 4-5 seconds.

So you should also consider giving your scripts a major overhaul. For
populizing content containers, you could use keywords instead for
example.

> I often wonder if this coulda/shoulda been done in a different product
> (something like LiveServer or even something other than RedDot)???

Usually LiveServer is used for xml/xsl transformations, fulltext seach
and personalization. I don't think that would solve your problem.

> We hear 8.0 is suppposed to be rebuilt from the ground up and much
> MUCH better in terms of performance than 6.5 or 7.5 was.

RedDot 8 will run on .NET framework. I'm not completely sure if
already each and every part will be rewritten or just the core
components (e.g. page builder) in the beginning. I think it will still
take some time to get finished and personally I wouldn't use a point-
zero release in a productive environment but wait for 8.1 at least. A
complete platform switch is a huge ammount of work for every kind of
software.