Sitecore Performance & Troubleshooting Tools

As a consultant within a Managed Services practice, I am often tasked to dig into ancient developer code in search of bottlenecks. Discovering performance issues on Sitecore builds can be tricky because each site you may work on follow different development patterns.

I found that the most common issues only surface after accumulating data, where some components may not have been tested using more than a few items of data.  The fix often ends up being some modification to specific Sitecore queries, or perhaps changing the way data is retrieved from Sitecore (switching to pull from a Lucene index).  Whatever it is, finding the bottleneck is just the first step.

Luckily for us, there are plenty of tools available that make troubleshooting and pin-pointing these issues a thousand times easier.  Regardless of Sitecore version you're working with, here are four performance / troubleshooting tools I often fire up from my arsenal to get to the bottom of slow load times.

SITECORE LOG ANALYZER

This is a given!  If something odd is going on in your Sitecore website, one of the first places to look for clues is the Sitecore logs.  This handy tool developed by Sitecore loads the entire Sitecore log folder and allows you to filter by date, string, message type (ERROR, INFO, DEBUG, etc).    This is often much easier than sifting through flat .txt files.

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

SITECORE DEBUG TOOL

Built right into Sitecore - I only started utilizing this tool a few years into my career working with Sitecore, but it's been a life saver in a few instances.  My guess is that devs often forget that this exists.  Some features include full trace information for each rendering and profiling - which comes in handy when attempting to identify bottlenecks.  If you're trying to identify which rendering on a page are being pulled from the Sitecore cache, this is one of the best way to find out.

To enable the debugger, the following prerequisites must be satisfied:

1. Ensure the "allowDebug" and "enableDebugger" attributes for the site are set to true in the site node of the Sites.config.
2. Ensure you're logged into Sitecore with a user member utilizing the 'sitecore\Sitecore Client Developing' role.

Additional information on how to use the Sitecore debugger can still be found here:
The Sitecore Debugger

APACHE JMETER

Apache JMeter is an open-source Java application which (among other handy features) is great for running load/stress tests and providing the calculated results for analysis.  When configured properly can send multiple HTTP requests to a designated URL location and provides an average load time throughout the increased traffic.  For me, this has been a great way to obtain visualizations of page load time behaviors before and after making caching or other performance enhancement changes.

For more: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-apache-jmeter-to-perform-load-testing-on-a-web-server 

 http://jmeter.apache.org/

TELERIK FIDDLER

I'm a big fan of Telerik's suite of developer tools.    Fiddler is one of those tools I always make sure to have installed on my dev box.  If you don't already know, Fiddler logs all HTTP/S traffic between your computer and the web.  This comes in handy when gathering statistics of internal or third-party calls, viewing client headers and/or cookies, viewing results of an API call and more.

http://www.telerik.com/fiddler

TELERIK JUSTTRACE

While JustTrace isn't free, it's definitely one the of easiest .NET profiling tools I've worked with.   Its intuitive tracing mechanism which allows us to identify which .NET components take the most CPU and memory resources which ultimately affect page load times.  In most cases the snapshots provide exact methods to look into and tweak until a more reasonable load time is obtained.

http://www.telerik.com/products/memory-performance-profiler.aspx 

If you haven't tried these tools, I'd recommend playing around with them at some point.  They may become an integral part of your own troubleshooting whether during development or post-production support.  

Have you used any of these in the past?  What are your favorite performance troubleshooting tools?

Let me know in the comments!