Utilizing caching improves Sitecore performance and there are plenty of posts on this topic. While doing some performance analysis on an inherited solution I was surprised to find that caching was not being utilized to its full potential. In this post, i’ll share some useful scripts and tools that make the task of monitoring and tuning cache settings easier.
Continue readingMonth: August 2020
Handy JMeter Script to crawl your site
JMeter is my tool of choice for load testing. This isn’t necessarily a load test but rather a useful script to crawl site urls using a sitemap. By hitting every accessible url allows Sitecore to populate all the various caches and provides you with a sense of the potential sizes of the various Sitecore caches and helps you identify any tuning that may be required.
Continue readingSitecore Publishing Service in a geo-distributed environment
If you’ve never used the publishing service before it’s an awesome opt-in for Sitecore to provide blazingly fast publishing by performing bulk publish operations. If you are needing to improve performance over your existing Sitecore publishing or reduce load on your Content Management Role then you should consider looking into setting up Publish service available since Sitecore 8.2. In this post I’ll share some discoveries while setting up Publish Service v4.2 on Sitecore 9.3 on Azure PaaS. It was pretty straightforward and painless! It just works really well!
Sitecore and Geo-Distribution
So I’ve been involved in several projects where I’ve had to setup geo-distributed Sitecore environments and/or scale the Sitecore Content Management and Content Delivery roles along with the plethora of roles XP Scaled provides. I’ll share some of those experiences here and some hurdles and how to overcome them.
Geo-Distributed Content Delivery
You can configure one or more content delivery servers for improved scalability and better performance. If you expect to have high numbers of visitors or want to configure servers in different geographic locations, ideally nearest to your customers.
In order to reduce latency you will want your web database in the same region as your CD. If you have multiple clusters in different regions you will need to consider how you plan to keep these web dbs up-to-date. Normally you would implement multiple publish targets, however Sitecore also supports geo-replication of the web database. See my post on Publish Targets vs Azure Geo replication for more details.
What other services and or roles do you need to support Content Delivery and where should these be located? More on this later… Continue reading
Neil Killen 