Total Hits

Summary Tables

Top Posts for all days ending 2012-02-22 (Summarized)

Here’s the Stats Summary which I would like to share with you:

Quick Facts

* Total Posts : 73
* Total Comments : 73
* Total Categories : 25
* Total Tags : 32
* Average Visits per Day : 54

Thanks to all who inspired and appreciated my work – Yes I am saying thanks to you – My friends,readers and daily visitors!

Happy Reading! and Happy Sitecoring!

Since so long back, we faced one problem in which when we open Sitecore installation wizard/Package Designer it was showing following error:

Server Error in ‘/’ Application.

Unable to load one or more of the requested types. Retrieve the LoaderExceptions property for more information.

Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.Reflection.ReflectionTypeLoadException: Unable to load one or more of the requested types. Retrieve the LoaderExceptions property for more information.

Source Error:

Stack Trace:

[ReflectionTypeLoadException: Unable to load one or more of the requested types.
Retrieve the LoaderExceptions property for more information.]
   System.Reflection.Module._GetTypesInternal(StackCrawlMark& stackMark) +0
   System.Reflection.Assembly.GetTypes() +105
   Sitecore.Install.Configuration.InstallerObjectFactory..ctor() +96
   Sitecore.Install.Configuration.InstallerObjectFactory..cctor() +21

[TypeInitializationException: The type initializer for 'Sitecore.Install.
Configuration.InstallerObjectFactory' threw an exception.]
   Sitecore.Install.Configuration.InstallerObjectFactory.get_Instance() +0
   Sitecore.Shell.Applications.Install.UIFactory.GetContextUri(Type type) +11
   Sitecore.Shell.Applications.Install.UIFactory.GetContextUri(Object instance) +19
   Sitecore.Shell.Applications.Install.Controls.ProjectView.UpdateContext() +80
   Sitecore.Shell.Applications.Install.Controls.ProjectView.SetSelection(String property) +57
   Sitecore.Shell.Applications.Install.Designer.OnLoad(EventArgs e) +178

[TargetInvocationException: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation.]
   System.RuntimeMethodHandle._InvokeMethodFast(Object target, Object[] arguments, SignatureStruct& sig,
MethodAttributes methodAttributes, RuntimeTypeHandle typeOwner) +0
   System.RuntimeMethodHandle.InvokeMethodFast(Object target, Object[] arguments, Signature sig,
MethodAttributes methodAttributes, RuntimeTypeHandle typeOwner) +71
   System.Reflection.RuntimeMethodInfo.Invoke(Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, Binder binder,
Object[] parameters, CultureInfo culture, Boolean skipVisibilityChecks) +261
   System.Reflection.RuntimeMethodInfo.Invoke(Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, Binder binder,
Object[] parameters, CultureInfo culture) +29
   Sitecore.Reflection.ReflectionUtil.InvokeMethod(MethodInfo method, Object[] parameters, Object obj) +45
   Sitecore.Reflection.ReflectionUtil.CallMethod(Type type, Object obj, String methodName,
Boolean includeNonPublic, Boolean includeInherited, Boolean includeStatic, Object[] parameters) +87
   Sitecore.Reflection.ReflectionUtil.CallMethod(Object obj, String methodName,
Boolean includeNonPublic, Boolean includeInherited, Object[] parameters) +43
   Sitecore.Web.UI.Sheer.ClientPage.OnLoad(EventArgs e) +191
   Sitecore.Shell.Web.UI.SecurePage.OnLoad(EventArgs e) +24
   System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() +50
   System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint,
Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint) +627

Solution:

After trying lot of things finally we found the solution. Basically under “/website/bin” folder  “ITHit.WebDAV.Server.dll” was missing. We got it from other developer’s box for whom it was working fine and it fixed the issue!

I hope it will help you as well, when you are ready to send a deployment and at that same time Package Designer/Installation wizard is not working.

Happy Sitecoring!

Challenge:

We were facing one issue in which one of our page was taking  > 2.5  minutes to load in preview mode and surprisingly it was working fine in Page Editor Mode.

After analyzing a lot we found that, one of the control was fetching sub items of current page/item and all the sub items were having – “Subitems Sorting” field in Appearance section’s value as “Created”. [Just a note : all items are in one language and having one version only!]

What you are also facing the same issue? and you also have same behavior? Eager to know the solution? please go to next section..

Solution:

When we set it to blank instead of “Created“  it resolved the issue and now page gets loaded in 2 seconds!

We got this hint from this blog, must read! : http://blog.wojciech.org/?p=88 [Really helpful, thanks a lot]

Good to read on Sorting:

http://sitecore.alexiasoft.nl/2009/08/04/sorting-sitecore-items/
http://sitecoreblog.blogspot.in/2010/11/change-default-subitems-sort-order.html
http://learnsitecore.cmsuniverse.net/en/Editors/Articles/2009/11/SortingItems.aspx
http://firebreaksice.com/how-to-sort-sitecore-items-in-the-content-editor/

Happy Sitecoring!

PS : Special thanks to Siddhi who lead us towards this solution!

2011 has been good and busy year (But It’s good to be busy, in the work which you are passionate about!).  The whole year was really good and I learnt and explored Sitecore in-depth this year (and I’m still learning it and will be continue doing it in upcoming year as well!).

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 16,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 6 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Quick facts:

• This blog was viewed about 16,000 times in 2011.
•  There were 70 new posts,
• The busiest day of the year was June 27th with 177 views. The most popular post that day was DreamCore Europe 2011 Experience.
• Most visitors came from The United States. The United Kingdom & India were not far behind.

Click here to see the complete report.

See you in 2012

Thanks for your support, visits and flying with us in 2011!
We look forward to serving you again in 2012! Happy New Year!

Happy Sitecoring, Happy Coding and Happy Reading!

Sitecore control panel contains loads of functionality which has not been highlighted very well. [We use its "Clean Up Databases" functionality for cleaning up our Sitecore DB during maintenance].

To read more details about it, I visited SDN and found this SDN document : http://sdn.sitecore.net/Reference/Archive/SC53%20End%20User/Control%20Panel.aspx This document explains the functionality very well. But the screen-shots are from Sitecore 5.3 and few options has been removed and few has been added. So, thought to update the new screen-shot and this post is a result of it!

Solution:

If you would like to know about each option, the SDN link is very helpful. OR why don’t give a try on your local environment and see what it does?

My favorite options from Sitecore Control panel are as below:

• Clean Up Databases :- http://sdn.sitecore.net/Reference/Archive/SC53%20End%20User/Control%20Panel/Database/Clean%20Up%20Databases.aspx
  
• Change Your Desktop Background :- Change background of your Sitecore desktop.
  
• Reset My Settings to Default Values :- Resets your profile settings e.g. If you have selected from Publish form that don’t show first page and after sometime you would like to see that first page you can reset it from here.
  

Happy Sitecoring!

HTML Caching plays a vital role in improving performance of Sitecore front-end websites, there are the good amount of information (posts) available. Through this post, I will be trying to put them under one post, along with my learning!

Solution:

Before implementing any new thing, I ask three questions to my self What, Why, How (WWH) . And if you know answers of all these three questions, you can easily learn and implement anything! So, let’s start answering them one by one:

What is HTML Caching?

HTML Caching is first layer of cache which gets checked whenever user requests any page (If you are new to Sitecore caching, I would strongly recommend you to read my earlier post on Sitecore Caching). It caches the data generated and packaged from bottom layers at top layers. So, on each request Sitecore don’t have to do all process again which is already done!

Why HTML Caching?

As we know Sitecore is a CMS and it stores everything in a raw format in database and on request, it converts that raw data in Item and then finally HTML format — This is what browser understands!

Usually, there are some portion in site which are not regularly updated or they are shared across all the pages e.g. Header, Footer, Menu etc. So, Using HTML Caching we can cache that output for better performance! (Which leads to better user experience and happy client(s) )

How to apply HTML Caching?

You can apply HTML Caching (before applying HTML Caching make sure cacheHtml=”true” under sites section) from Global Renderings : (Image Source : http://sitecoreblog.alexshyba.com/2011/05/how-to-verify-html-cache-is-working.html )

OR

at Page level rendering as well as shown below : (Image Source :http://learnsitecore.cmsuniverse.net/en/Developers/Articles/2009/07/CachingOverview.aspx)

For more information, please refer Presentation Component Reference : http://sdn.sitecore.net/Reference/Sitecore%206/Presentation%20Component%20Reference.aspx and http://sdn.sitecore.net/upload/sitecore6/sc62keywords/cache_configuration_reference_a4.pdf

If you would like to understand about each check box e.g. Vary by Data, Vary by Device etc. then refer following screen-shot [Source : NLC's whitepaper):

How to disable HTML Caching for CM environment?

In Sitecore world few people create two URLs for same site one is for CM environment (Points to Master DB) -- Where Editors work and one is for CD environment (Points to Web DB) - Where front end users access the live site!

Now, If you would like to disable HTML Caching for CM environment and would like it to be available for CD environment then you can do it by changing cacheHtml attribute's value to false under Sites/Site section for CM Site.

<site name="CMwebsite" ... cacheHtml="false" ... />

How to check applied HTML Caching is working or not?

To do this task, Alex Shyba has already written nice article on it : http://sitecoreblog.alexshyba.com/2011/05/how-to-verify-html-cache-is-working.html

Basically, I prefer to use /sitecore/admin/cache.aspx/stats.aspx OR if you want to see what lies in each HTML Cache entry (More useful for expert level!) use http://trac.sitecore.net/CachingManager

What is the HTML Cache Size Limit? Is it possible to increase it?

By default HTML Cache size comes from following attributes from Web.config:

1. Caching.DefaultHtmlCacheSize : Determines the default size of the html cache of a site specify the value in bytes or append the value with KB, MB or GB

<setting name="Caching.DefaultHtmlCacheSize" value="10MB" />

2. htmlCacheSize : under Sites/Site section. If you have provided value here it will override the value provide in #1.

<site name="website" ... cacheHtml="true" htmlCacheSize="10MB" />

3. section next to the section.

<cacheSizes>
<sites>
<website>
<html>10MB</html>
<registry>1MB</registry>
<viewState>1MB</viewState>
<xsl>5MB</xsl>
</website>
</sites>
</cacheSizes>

Yes, you can increase (or in some cases decrease) HTML Cache size value as per your need!

When HTML Cache will get cleared?

On publish end (if you are using Sitecore Version >= 6.3 then on publish:end:remote) it will clear HTML Cache for configured sites. As shown below from event section of your web.config file:

 <handler type="Sitecore.Publishing.HtmlCacheClearer, Sitecore.Kernel" method="ClearCache">
 <sites hint="list">
 <site>website</site>
 </sites>
 </handler>
 

Just a note : If you are running Multi-Site from your Single Sitecore instance then on publish of one site, it will clear HTML Cache for other sites as well, even-though it is not required. To overcome this issue you have to hand-craft your own handler! We’ve already done this. So, if you need any help give a shout!

How it works?

• Theoretically : On each request, it checks whether requested data is available in HTML layer cache or not. If found it will return the response from that layer else it will go in other layers generate the data, using renderings logic convert it in to HTML and if HTML Caching enabled then generated output will be cached in HTML Cache and served to an end-user. So, on next request it will server data from HTML Cache, the first layer of cache!
• Technically: 1. While generating a page ASP.NET Calls the Page.Render() method of Sitecore.Web.UI.WebControl
  2. Caching logic
  If (IsKeyExistinHTMLCache)
  {
  Render() method writes the cached data to the output stream;
  }
  else
  {
  Calls the DoRender() method,
  If (Control is Cacheable)
  {
  the Sitecore.Web.UI.WebControl.Render() method adds the output of the control to the output cache.
  }
  } 3. Key generation logic : for generating each cache key when you mark control as cachable, Sitecore uses the result of calling the GetCachingID() method plus a string that identifies the context language as the key for the cache entry. If you select additional VaryBy parameters, Sitecore adds additional strings to the key. Would you like to see Cache Keys and Cache entries? http://trac.sitecore.net/CachingManager will help you to do it!

Source : http://www.sitecore.net/Community/Technical-Blogs/John-West-Sitecore-Blog/Posts/2011/09/How-the-Sitecore-ASPNET-CMS-Caches-Output.aspx

We are using WebControls for our renderings. Do I have to do anything extra to make them HTML Cache supportable?

Nothing special, Just make sure your control does following two required things:

1. Inherits from Sitecore.Web.UI.WebControl abstract base class

2. implement the DoRender() method

3. implement the GetCachingID() method

For more information please refer : http://www.sitecore.net/Community/Technical-Blogs/John-West-Sitecore-Blog/Posts/2011/09/How-the-Sitecore-ASPNET-CMS-Caches-Output.aspx

HTML Caching will work with postback controls?

No, It won’t work. For more information please refer : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3628185/sitecore-turning-on-html-caching-blocks-postback-behavior

Happy HTML Caching!

Just wanted to share with you. So, If during your up-gradation you don’t invest the time which we already! (Obviously, You can share any new things which you faced during your up-gradation process).

Challenge1 : Error: The requested name is valid, but no data of the requested type was found when calling Dns GetHostByAddress

Whenever we were opening Sitecore login page we used to get this error and to solve this error we need to enable “use NETBIOS over TCPIP” [Source : http://www.mycsharpcorner.com/Post.aspx?postID=28]

Challenge2 : The ‘Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0′ provider is not registered on the local machine.

We tried everything suggested which Google suggested us from following articles:
http://ybbest.wordpress.com/2009/07/22/the-microsoft-ace-oledb-12-0-provider-is-not-registered-on-the-local-machine/
http://karthickmicrosoft.blogspot.com/2010/05/microsoftaceoledb120-provider-is-not.html

Basically they suggested us to change the application to 32 bit and do run it! But it was not the solution in our case, as we wanted to take full benefit of Integrated Pipeline mode also we earlier learnt that Sitecore works best in ASP.NET 64
bit mode. So, we were sure that we have to find some another solution. So, we delved again in to Google ocean and found pearl from it! Basically you need to install 64 bit drivers to make it working! [Source : http://blog.newslacker.net/2011/08/microsoftaceoledb120-provider-is-not.html]

Just a note : after installing drivers, it’s good to manually restart IIS using command prompt!

Challenge3 IIS related : few things which we found (and learnt) were related to IIS Only!

1. iisreset practice : Right click and then do iisrest! As per Windows Server 2008 architecture command prompt automatically dosen’t run in Admin mode. You have to forcefully to do it! (sometime annoying. But it makes sure you are doing IISRESET when you really need to do!)
2. IIS Log files : When you run Sitecore 6.x in Integrated Pipeline Mode, You will notice that ALL IIS log entries contain the log entry for the resquest to the layout (aspx) page (instead of the actual sitecore item .e.g /ContactUs.aspx). To solve this error you need to write your own IIS Module, How to do it? Refer following article: http://www.bolaky.net/post/IIS-75-Logging-with-Sitecore-6x-in-Integrated-Pipeline-Mode.aspx Just a note :The IIS  Module uses app.Context.RewritePath(originalPath); method which is a heavy method to use. So, before adding this module, give yourself a though. Do you really need (or use) this log entries for any purpose? Can’t you live without them? If Yes, I would strongly recommend not to add it!
3. Global.asax’s Application_BeginRequest was not getting called every time : And we had our custom security code in that method. So, if it won’t get called our application will not work. After digging a bit we found that it’s behavior of IIS and to solve it we did following change in our web.config:

<modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests=”true”>

For more information on this read : http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/121/iis-modules-overview/

Good to read :
IIS Performance analysis by Microsoft : http://blogs.technet.com/b/mscom/archive/2008/06/09/microsoft-com-operations-performance-analysis-of-iis-7-0-windows-server-2008.aspx
http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/624/application-pool-identities/

Happy Up-gradation!

http://www.sitecore.net/Community/Technical-Blogs/John-West-Sitecore-Blog/Archive.aspx

If you like it say thanks to John West!

Happy Sitecoring!

11,000 may not be a big number for big expert names like John West,Dan Brown,Alex Shyba,Alex de Groot,Brian Pedersen, Jens Mikkelsen and many more as they are the experts in Sitecore. And I won’t feel ashamed to say that I have learnt Sitecore from their blogs only! [In India we call it Eklavya way of learning!] — Thank you guys for sharing your knowledge with us. But it is a big number for a person like me who is still learning Sitecore!

I remember that I’ve started blogging from March 2011 and till today I’m learning how to write a good blog — yeah agree that each and every day I’ve learnt a lot, and still learning!

Here’s the Stats Summary which I would like to share with you:

Quick Facts

* Total Posts : 65
* Total Comments : 61
* Total Categories : 23
* Total Tags : 25
* Total Visits 2011(at a time of writing this blog) : 11,057
* Average Visits per Day : 51

Thanks to all who inspired and appreciated my work – Yes I am saying thanks to you – My friends,readers and daily visitors!

Happy Reading! and Happy Sitecoring!

If you are walking through the log files and if you are finding following lines in log file:

4996 02:21:26 WARN  Memory usage exceeded the MemoryMonitor threshold.
4996 02:21:26 WARN  Memory usage: 4,351,668,224
4996 02:21:26 WARN  Number of suppressed logs due to the minimum time between log entries: 10

It means that your Sitecore instance is consuming more memory than the allocated threshold limit.

Now, the question may come in your mind that — can we increase it? If yes from where? What should be the ideal size?
Or if you have plenty of RAM available on your CM server and it is just hosting Sitecore site only and you are not able to see RAM size consumption more than 30-40% then this post is for you!

Solution:

It comes from Web.Config’s MemoryMonitHook configuration.
I would strongly recommend you to read http://sdn.sitecore.net/Reference/Sitecore%206/Cache%20Configuration
%20Reference.aspx as per “The Memory Monitor “ section. It suggests following settings[Which are default one]

<hook type="Sitecore.Diagnostics.MemoryMonitorHook, Sitecore.Kernel">
<param desc="Threshold">4096MB</param>
<param desc="Check interval">00:00:05</param>
<param desc="Minimum time between log entries">00:01:00</param>
<ClearCaches>false
<GarbageCollect>false
<AdjustLoadFactor>false
</hook>

Description of tags are as follows:

• Threshold : Threshold limit for worker process. The ideal value of this should be 60% of your available RAM
• ClearCaches : Enabling ClearCaches would cause MemoryMonitor to completely clear all Sitecore caches.
• GarbageCollect : GarbageCollect defines whether Sitecore will issue a forced garbage collection after clearing caches. In general, multiple forced garbage collections may decrease the performance of your application and .NET runtime is expected to perform collections automatically in a most efficient way.
• AdjustLoadFactor : AdjustLoadFactor can be enabled for MemoryMonitorHook in order to increase calculated sizes of Sitecore caches, which results in decreasing their actual sizes by decreasing the number of entires Sitecore puts into caches. Using AdjustLoadFactor may only be required in a memory-constrained environments to prevent Out Of Memory errors, such as when running 32-bit application pool mode.

Just a note : I would highly recommend running IIS 7.5 (Windows Server 2008 R2) and 64-bit application pool mode for the optimal performance of high volume Sitecore applications.

Q. If you are seeing above given error message, then is it a reason to get worried?
Ans. This is not an error that you see in the log files, but just a warning that the Memory Monitor reports when it reaches the defined memory usage limit. You should be able to ignore the warning assuming that this is an expected memory usage of the application and if you are running a 64-bit process.

You can disable the memory monitor by setting its interval to 00:00:00, or you can increase the threshold by setting it to
e.g. 8GB.

But, even though after increasing the Threshold you are able to see this warning it means that your application is consuming lot of memory and you may need to check your code OR upgrade your RAM.

By default we had our MemoryMonitHook’s Threshold as 4096MB and due to that it was just utilizing 30-40% RAM only on our CM Server. But after increasing Threshold value to 60% of our RAM Size. Now, it is working fine.

Happy Memory Monitor Hooking!

Our CM Instance was responding very slow. When the day starts it works well. But as the day moves on it starts becoming slow. And sometime it becomes slow from start of the day itself.[It was totally random] Locking an item, navigating from one item to another item, saving an item, previewing an item etc. was taking lot of time.
After investigating lot of things starting from network till application, finally we solved this challenge! [Touchwood!]. I know you must be eager and impatient to know the solution. But while working on this challenge, we learnt to have some patience and passion to solve these kinds of issues!

Solution:

Frankly, for performance issue there is no any master-key available which you put in to lock and your issue will get solved, you have to keep trying all the keys you have and trust me at one good day, your one key will surely help you to open the lock!

Basic: Whenever any application is performing slow, as per the basic concept. It can be issue at any place like Network, routing, OS, Hardware, Database server, Database configuration, Application Server, Application etc. and you should not miss any of these!

Before you start trying all options given below, have some mechanism and statistical data to measure the performance improvement.
Just a note: For few options I will follow the DRY [Don’t repeat yourself] rule. So, will provide you link to my earlier articles! So, please enjoy reading them as well!

So, let me share all the areas [keys] we tried to get to the bottom of this issue:

1. Log files: In a Sitecore world, Application log files are our best friend! [Good to know that Sitecore uses Log4Net for log files]. So, whenever you face any issue. First place to check is Sitecore log files, is anything wrong there? Try looking at some pattern [TIP: Use Notepad++ or Log Parser Lizard - for querying your Sitecore log file]. Keep checking it always and if in a series nothing wrong found in log file. Then you should try next option. Also, enable Threshold logs.
2. IIS Logs – Here you can check is there any page taking lot of time? Are there any crawler sending lots of requests on your CM Server? [Tip : Log Parser Lizard will help you to query your IIS log file]. Digging gold in IIS logfiles
3. System resources: Check your CM Instance’s CPU/Memory usage trend. Troubleshooting guide.
4. Performance counters: If you reached here and found no solution yet. My dear friend don’t worry, we will surely be able to solve your issue

   Now, we need to check that whether Network, Application, Database server is an issue or not?
   When application becomes slow, precisely at that time what is the stage of system resources? Obviously we can’t ask one person to constantly seat and keep checking it. To achieve this we can use perfmon. Configure following performance counters on Database server and Application server.

   Category	Counter	Process
   Memory	Available Mbytes	All
   PhysicalDisk	Avg. Disk Queue Length	_Total
   Process	Private Bytes	Worker Process for Sitecore,_Total
   Process	Virtual Bytes	Worker Process for SITECORE,_Total
   Process	Page File Bytes	Worker Process for SITECORE,_Total
   Process	IO Data Operations/sec	Worker Process for SITECORE,_Total
   Process	IO Other Operations/sec	Worker Process for SITECORE,_Total
   Process	% Processor Time	Worker Process for SITECORE,_Total
   Network Interface	Bytes Total/sec	All Instances
   Network Interface	Output Queue Length	All Instances

   [Tip: to analyze performance counters use PAL]

5. Database Test : Sitecore has a tool known as “Database performance Test” which helps us to identify that whether there is any issue with Database [Fragmentation?], Database server, Connectivity between application and Database server, etc. [It does not pin point directly to any possibility. But if you get the statistics which are alarming then you can check all above suggested possibilities].

   If you have not used this tool earlier, and would like to read more about it, Please do read my earlier blog on Database Test
   Basically, If Average Time exceeds Boundary Average Time, this may imply SQL database performance problems.

6. CounterDumpAgent : CounterDumpAgent is very helpful agent which comes with Sitecore – Basically it dumps all the useful Sitecore counters related information in one file. If you would like to read more about it, I would suggest you to read my earlier blog on CounterDumpAgent.

   After configuring this Agent, we found that there were heavy cache clearings going on, which was causing us slowness. [Thanks to Maxim Savelyev from Sitecore support for helping us out to find this].

   Majorly following two caches:

   AccessResultCache: It was getting fully cleared in following scenarios:

   • Using Sitecore API we call UserProfile.Save() method
   • Whenever you click on accept button of Rich Text Editor
   • Whenever you proceed on Publish wizard

   Sitecore support team accepted this as a BUG and they provide us a HotFix for it with HotfixID – 349789-2

          Master[Items]: It was getting fully cleared in following scenarios:

• Whenever you save any template [as per our architecture our CAs can add/update/delete templates, which was flushing this cache whole day. We discussed this issue with Sitecore support and they explained us that due to technical limitations they can’t provide any solution – and I agree with them! But they suggested us to fine tune the caches for layers which are below master cache – To read more about Caching read my earlier blog on Caching basics]
• Whenever you save any template without making any changes in to template (As per window practice few users keep pressing CTRL + S again and again) [Sitecore accepted it as a bug and they provided us a Hotfix for the same. HotfixID - 351159]
• Whenever you publish any template [Basically we added one handler on publish item processing which modifies an item which is being published and save it. It was doing this operation for all the items. Instead of that we added one check that if currently published item is Template then don’t do any modifications]

     7. Cache Tuning: Sitecore heavily and nicely uses cache for giving better performance. So, check your cache
utilization and if needed fine tune it. [Tip : use Cache Tuner for fine tuning your cache]

     8. TCP Chimney: Basically, TCP Chimney offloads all the network related operations from CPU to NIC. So, your          CPU Usage stays normal. But couple of NICs (BroadCom NetXtreme II,Hewlett-Packard NC373i Multifunction Gigabit Server Adapter) implementation for TCP Chimney is buggy. [Good to read]

       9. IIS 7.5: Earlier we were running our CM instance on IIS 6.0 and after migrating it to 7.5 It can handle 57% more requests and it can utilize CPU. And it gave us a good performance improvement [Good to read : IIS 7.5]

After doing step#6 and #7 we got around 30% improvements in response time!

And after doing step#9 we got around 40% improvements in response time!

Thanks to Maxim Savelyev – from Sitecore support team for helping us out to resolve this issue!

Sorry for writing such a long article, and thanks for reading it patiently!

Happy Performance Tuning!

Good to read:

http://sdn.sitecore.net/scrapbook/optimizing%20sitecore%20performance.aspx
CMS Performance Tuning guide
http://www.iislogs.com/steveschofield/troubleshooting-iis-7-network-performance-issues-and-tcp-chimney-offload-receive-side-scaling-and-network-direct-memory-access
http://weblogs.asp.net/andreaszenker/archive/2008/12/03/2003-2008-server-asp-net-slow-refresh-tcp-chimney-offload.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/chaun/archive/2008/02/20/disabling-the-tcpchimney-during-iis-6-0-troubleshooting.aspx

First of all apologize for not writing and sharing anything new since so long with every one of you! As I was busy doing something critical and as it was critical you should be sure that I’ve learnt a lot from it. So, it means that I’ve lot of stuff to share with you. Stay tuned!

Anyways, let’s come to the point While working on QuickItemSearch module (Basic feature of this module is to jump to an item which you provided in text box [You haven't tried it yet? I strongly recommend you to try it out!]), I faced one problem which I came across again on SDN forum : http://sdn.sitecore.net/forum//ShowPost.aspx?PostID=39755

Basically it prompts you “Save” prompt even if you have not changed anything.

The solution for this problem is simple. But figuring it out was not so simple! That’s why thought worth to document it here :

Solution:

To disable this when you are doing something programmatically, Including following line in your code file:

// To disable the page modified alert message
Context.ClientPage.Modified = false;

Happy Coding!

Our main job is to keep our Sitecore sites performance high! So, while doing this we come up with lots of WOW things which Sitecore provides. But there is no much document available OR so less guys wrote article which shares main purpose of it. Today, I’m going to share with you the new hidden gem of Sitecore and that’s CounterDumpAgent!

Let’s crack on!

Solution:

What is CounterDumpAgent?

One of those features is the CounterDumpAgent. This agent dumps diagnostics data from Sitecore and can be used when debugging slow or faulty websites. You can see cache clear/hit/miss information, client data reads/writes, jobs in the pipeline, number of publishing, security and system data and much more.

[Source : http://briancaos.wordpress.com/2007/03/05/sitecore-53-have-you-heard-of-the-counterdumpagent/ Above definition describes everything!]

How to enable it?

As you know all Agent resides in Web.config — and same holds true with CounterDumpAgent as well.

<!-- Agent to dump performance counter data -->
<agent type="Sitecore.Tasks.CounterDumpAgent" method="Run" interval="00:05:00">
<DumpFile>$(dataFolder)/diagnostics/counters.{date}.{time}.{processid}.txt
</agent>

DumpFile indicates the location where your dump file will be created and string surrounded with {} will be replaced by date, time and ProcessID.
In simple language, configuration given above will generate counterdumpagent file under DATAFOLDER/diagnostics folder
on 5 Minutes interval! [Your Frequency setting matters!]

From where I can see CounterDumpAgent files?

You can see your log files under <DATAFOLDER>/diagnostics folder.

How to analyze CounterDumpAgent file(s)?

Format of CounteDumpAgent file is in XML, and brief of its schema is as under:

<category name=’<Category of a counter>’>

if you are generating one file a day then it will be easy for you to check the XML file and see what’s going on! But in real world we configure CounterDumpAgent to run ideally on every 5 minute. [12 files for each hour and 288 files a day!] going through all files and analyzing the counters doesn’t sounds good — correct?

Same with me — So, was thinking to develop a nice tool using which I can analyze counter dump data easily. And Eureka! idea strikes in my mind — Converting CounterDumpAgent file to CSV. So, once it has been converted in CSV, I can open it in powerful tool named as EXCEL and do the things more faster!

CounterDumpToCSVConverter is an output of it!

Below chart, I’ve generated in ~1 minute!

Would like to use it? Application along with user manual can be downloaded from here

Happy CounterDump Analyzing!

1. Training is really good thing — Try to do Student Exercises from training material. Before your team starts working on Sitecore train them.

2. Sitecore development has one flow, On which I’ve penned down an article – http://sitecorebasics.wordpress.com/2011/05/13/basics-of-sitecore-for-beginner-developers/

3. Before you start define what you want? [Plan before you start!] [How many users will be using the system? What is expected publish time?] – NonLinear and Oshyn Guys provided nice whitepapers on it. Links are here : http://sitecorebasics.wordpress.com/2011/05/11/sitecore-best-practices-and-implementation-guidelines/ http://sitecorebasics.wordpress.com/2011/03/09/sitecore-implementation-notes/

4. Get used to with Reflector – try exploring the things using Reflector.

5. Be active on SDN Forums and raise Sitecore support ticket when you don’t have any clue.

6. Plan your Development environment very well — I’ve penned down white paper on it — http://sitecorebasics.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/developing_and_deploying_with_sitecore_in_four_levels_version1-0.pdf

7. While planing for your CM and CD environments keep your vision long. Nice article on it : http://sitecorebasics.wordpress.com/2011/04/25/basics-of-sitecore-hosting-architecture/

8. Also, still your team becomes expert in Sitecore, validate all your implementations from any Sitecore partner, good Sitecore consultant(s).

Happy Sitecoring!

During my experience with Sitecore till date, I have seen few issues where CD Servers were crashing and after doing lot of R&D, efforts etc. I am able to fix them. So, Just wanted to share my findings with you!

If your CD Servers are crashing, then this post is for you! — It may give you solution or pointers towards solution!

Solution:

Before I get on to main thing, let me first explain the difference between “Hard Crash” and “Soft Crash”:

Monitor Sitecore log files for any application restarts. If a new log file is generated, this often means that a restart has occurred. Identify the reason for the restart and address it.

• If the log file ends with a ”Sitecore shutting down” message – this is a “soft crash” and for some reason the hosting environment has forced the process to recycle (for example, due to some scheduled recycling or some critical file changes).
• If the log file does not end with a “Sitecore shutting down” message – this a “hard crash” due to for example a stack overflow error or some worker thread deadlocks. A good solution could be to collect a process crash dump and analyze it with WinDbg.

Above content has been copied from Sitecore scrapbook entry and it explains everything!]

There may be one or other reason, due to which your Sitecore CD Servers crash, let me explain them one by one:

1. hostingenvironment initiated shutdown : This falls in category of “Soft Crash” category and you will be able to see this error message in your Sitecore log file.

-  ASP.NET Worker process restarted — It comes when ASP.NET worker process gets restarted, automatically by IIS due to Application Pool settings or any webroot change which causes ASP.NET Worker process to restart:

• Check Application Pool settings : To solve this error, first you can verify your Application Pool settings and verify that does any setting affected this restart? We have found one setting which was causing this error and that setting is Idle time configured in IIS — IIS restarts the application pool if worker process is idle for X amount of time. This will not be the case for the Sitecore instance, which gets lots of requests throughout a day. But if it is not the case for you then you should use Sitecore’s URL Agent — how to do it? Please read my earlier blog post which explains it in detail! [following DRY rule -- Don't Repeat Yourself!]
• Check ASP.NET worker process restart reasons : Second, you should check that does anything happened which caused ASP.NET Worker process to restart?  — Read my another blog post which explains the reasons in which case ASP.NET Worker process restart?

2. OutOfMemoryException – This falls in “Hard Crash” category, where your Sitecore instance will restart abruptly and  when you open the Sitecore log files, it will show you lots of OutOfMemoryException errors, let’s see how we can get out of it:

• Check caching configurations : It may happen that aggressively, you might have configured Cache size too big without considering your RAM size. So, please ensure caching configurations are perfect!

You can use my shared source module : CacheTuner and configure MemoryThreshold value in Web.config to 60% of your RAM size, So, worker process will not cross the limit, and if it does so, it will do the log entry for you!

• Check IIS is running in X64 Mode : This was the another reason which we faced. One of our CD server was crashing abruptly, and frankly it took our lots of time to find the root cause. Basically, we did the lot of R&D on this server and we forgot that We were running our IIS on 32 bit mode — and Sitecore also recommends that you should run your IIS on 64 BIT mode only. So, you will have better performance! So, how to check it? Nice scrapbook entry : – http://sdn.sitecore.net/scrapbook/64%20bit%20environments.aspx
• Get Crash Dump and analyze it :  And if nothing works for you from above methods. Good to install DebugDiagnostics tool, get the dumps and analyze it! [Frankly, too complex task to do! All the best!]

3. Check Memory usage : This is the main problem we faced on our CD servers, we configured our CD servers RAM when we started  the project and our DB size was also not too BIG. But even after lots of years we have never increased the RAM size and the DB size has become too BIG till that time. So, to analyze the situation we configured Performance counters on CD servers and after that analyzed it [Do you know PAL is a nice tool which helps you to analyze the performance counters easily! -- I would strongly recommend to use it!]. If you see the Memory is always under pressure — Either it can be memory leak OR Order a RAM!

Digging a CD crash, is the too funny task! [You need to have so much patience to solve it -- Because for days and days you don't get hint what's going wrong and where to check for the problem and solution? ]

Special thanks to Sitecore support team [Especially Maxim Savelyev] for helping us!

I hope I covered all the cases which causes CD servers to crash — You got anything new? Please do share with everyone!

Happy CD Crash Stopping!

Couple of days back, I visited his Site and found his new post, Which says “Sitecore CMS Performance Tuning Guide” is now available. For curiosity I opened that link. And frankly speaking it is the best Performance Tuning Guide I’ve ever read on Sitecore.

The way it has been documented (Symptoms, Recommendations, etc.) is awesome!

Link : CMS Performance Tuning Guide

This document is a collection of diagnostic procedures, tuning procedures, and Sitecore recommended practices for getting the optimal performance out of your Sitecore implementation.

A must read for anyone using Sitecore!

Download it and start reading it, I’m sure you will like it! [If you like it, please don't forget to say thanks to Dan Brown!]

Worth to read:

http://www.theclientview.net/?p=276

Happy CMS Performance Tuning!

For me It was a wonderful experience, as I live in India and was visiting London first time it self was a great experience! — Really nice and very well manged city!

DreamCore Europe 2011, being held in London at the Altitude 360 between June 7th and 9th.

Full agenda can be found here : http://www.sitecore.net/en/Events/DreamcoreEurope2011/Agenda.aspx

Let’s follow the Agenda!

Tuesday, June 7

“Welcome Cocktail Reception at the Tower Bridge Walkways” — 07:00 – 11:00 pm

What a welcome it was!

First, the place — TowerBridge – An engineering beauty!

The Welcome Cocktail Reception for Dreamcore Europe will be held at the picturesque Tower Bridge Walkways. This is an event not to be missed by any participant!

It allows you to talk to anyone (Sitecore MVP, Sitecore CEO, Sitecore Chairman, Sitecore Sales Director any Sitecore member or any delegate). The event was really nice and we had a word with lot of brainy people there! with unlimited cocktails!

I agree with what Sitecore guys said “This is an event not be missed by any participant!”

Wednesday, June 8

Venue – Altitude 360

This was the main day it started very early and had so many events!

We got Nice badge — Stating our name, company name and our country name. So, other participants can identify you easily! With nice diary and handy pocket mouse!

Then we started our sessions for first day! The first session was “General Session with a Keynote by Michael Seifert, CEO, Sitecore Corporation “. Before we start would you like to walk through the venue? Here you go:

It was at Ground floor, everything was set!

And the introduction video started! It shows some good statistics about Sitecore (Frankly, I liked this video so much!). You can also see it below (Must watch!):

And then Michael Seifert – Sitecore CEO started his keynote. Basically Sitecore is mostly aiming concentrating on CEP (Customer Engagement platform) — Which covers automatic marketing, where your customer spent most time? Following up your customer, As per Customer’s behavior suggesting him new products which suits him/her. To explain this many things Michael gave nice example! and he explained it very simply! It was really a great presentation!

Basically there were three Tracks to attend:

1. Technical Track A : Totally Technical

2. Technical Track B : Technical + Business

3. Business Track : Totally Business

my choice was obvious — Technical Track A (And this post also targets Technical people, If you are reading this post for Business Track related information, then I’m sorry)

Technology Overview Keynote

Lars Nielsen, Sitecore’s Co-founder and Senior VP Technical Marketing, and Kerry Bellerose, Senior VP Product Management, will kick off the Technical Track by introducing the latest exciting Sitecore technology and giving developers a sneak preview of upcoming releases including:

- Sitecore Online Marketing Suite 2.0
- Sitecore Marketing Automation Suite
- All new Page Editor
- Sitecore Rocks and many more!

In this session they presented from where they started and where they have reached — they also presented Sitecore 6.4 new features (also explained them in detail – Layout deltas!)

I was amazed with their presentation skills. Lars got good sense of humor and Kerry got good knowledge of full product — Whenever anyone asked any question Kerry has the answer!

It’s really nice to enjoy this session!

They also appreciated Jakob Christensen – Sitecore Rocks! developer and they also announced that they are going to invest more in Sitecore Rocks this year! [Really a great product! Unfortunately I missed to meet Jakob ]

Developer Goodies

Mind-blowing stuff is on its way! This session presented by Lars Nielsen, Sitecore’s Co-founder and Senior VP Technical Marketing, will focus on the new features of:

- Sitecore Rocks
- A preview of Sitecore’s Online Developer Infrastructure
- An introduction to the Better Shared Source program
- And many other cool surprises.

If someone asks me which presentation I liked the most then I will say this one. Lars presented the things very well and Sitecore Rocks really rocks! [Now, Sitecore Rocks works out side Visual Studio as well!].

Lars presented Sitecore Rocks with a developer’s routine life! [A developer's mind stack always got one thing -- that's coffee!].

OMS 2.0 – Under the Hood

Chief Technical Officer by day and Sitecore certified ninja by night, John West describe the various technical aspects of Sitecore’s OMS 2.0, including engineering objectives, the new database management strategy and schema, and configuration options. He will then present various examples using the new developer API.

Before session — I was lucky enough that I got time to speak to John — In SDN forum I always see his name. So, I always wanted to meet him! It was really nice experience!

In this session he explained all the bits of OMS — Frankly, I haven’t worked with OMS. So, most of the things I was unable to digest in this session. But meeting John was really a good thing out of this session!

[Sitecore] Episode 6.5 – The Page Editor Strikes Back

Sitecore has sought out developer feedback looking for technical reasons why customers might be reluctant to implement the Page Editor in their projects. This session, presented by Alexey Rusakov, Sitecore’s Product Manager, will walk you through new features introduced in CMS 6.4 and CMS 6.5 that put such technical challenges to rest.

Wow! changes in Sitecore 6.4-6.5 in Page Editor — It works with all browsers! (Even CE as well!)

They simplified Page Editor a lot! and makes thing simple!

All About Automation

This session is presented by Kerry Bellerose, Sitecore’s Senior VP for Product Management, will introduce you to Marketing Automation for developers. The session will discuss the components which make up Marketing Automation and explains how it works behinds the scenes. You will see some examples that illustrate how marketing users can create engagement plans to automate interaction with visitors without programming using Sitecore provided conditions and actions. You will also see how easily developers can extend the Marketing Automation Suite by adding conditions and actions specifically tailored to meet the special needs of their site.

He explained about Marketing automation in this session! Lots of exciting things are coming for Marketing people! Drag and drop and you are ready to go!

Day 1 ends here!

Thursday, June 9

The first session was the best session on this day!  Title and Description is as below:

Technical Interaction Panel

This is your chance to ask Sitecore senior technical product leadership your burning questions. Have important feedback about our products? Are you exploring new technologies that Sitecore might leverage? What about experiences you have had developing Sitecore solutions, accessing support or reading documentation? We want to hear it all and this is your chance to have an audience with the technology leaders who are setting Sitecore’s course. To frame the discussion we’ll start with our roadmap and plans. Join us for this one-of-a-kind opportunity!

I enjoyed this session a lot! It gave me chance to raise my questions and also listen questions from others!

After this session I had a word with lots of Sitecore internal people — And it was really great experience for me! It feels great when you speak to someone who has built the product from Scratch which you are using currently!

Shared source workshop for Developers

Jimmie Overby – Shared source Coordinator presented the present and future of Shared Source module! (Shared Source module portal will have lots of new things in future like Statistics, like button, rate button, comment etc.)

Concluding Visionary Speech – Michael Seifert & Darren Guarnaccia, Sitecore

Nice concluding visionary speech!

Social media integration, CEP etc. are the buzz words in Sitecore world! (Sitecore 7.0 is also coming!)

Dreamcore Europe 2012 is coming to Amsterdam

That’s it! Wonderful experience ends here! I hope you enjoyed this post!

Links

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dreamcorechannel/

http://sitecore-eu.posterous.com/dreamcore-eu-nl-photos

https://www.facebook.com/Sitecore#!/media/set/?set=a.216476081716791.59027.204509996246733

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.216476081716791.59027.204509996246733#!/Sitecore

http://blog.eduserv.org.uk/2011/06/20/dreamcore-2011/

Happy Sitecoring!

If your Sitecore is restarting periodically? and if you see following log entry in your log file

“HostingEnvironment initiated shutdown”
All your cache is being flushed?
If your Sitecore instance sits idle and your cache gets flushed automatically as your Sitecore instance
got restarted?

Then probably this post is for you!

Solution:

We were also struggling to solve above issues. And the pattern what we observed is that — If We keep system idle it restarts itself. This lead us to following solution:

http:///sitecore/keepalive.aspx
true/false

Basically the URL pointed in above configuration was wrong, we changed it and it started working fine!

You must be curious to know what it does?

The Sitecore keep alive agent, required to prevent a restart of the Sitecore web application during long periods of inactivity

In short this agent requests provided URL in one hour interval.  which will keep your worker process alive! [Updated - thanks to Sudeep]

Simple right? But very effective!

Long live worker process!

Our CM Server was performing bit slow. First we checked all the things (log files etc.). But nothing good we were able to find out. So, we decided to check few pages which might have some issue in rendering/sublayout/the way page has been built. To dig in to this issue we started reading something which should help us to do the same. We searched a bit and found “Threshold” functionality from Sitecore. We read some basics of it and enabled it. And we got so huge log files out of it and confused us which lead us to read more on it and understand it deeply. So, if you are also confused same as us then this post is for you!

Solution:

Okay, let’s start with Basics. If you don’t know what is Threshold then please read following blog entry – Really very well explained!:

http://learnsitecore.cmsuniverse.net/en/Administrators/Articles/2009/06/ThresholdExceeds.aspx

In short, there are three type of Thresholds:

Item Threshold : Related to total Item accessed.

Memory Threshold : Related to total memory consumed.

Timing Threshold : Related to total time consumed.

Okay you read this and open your Web.Config file and enable Threshold log entries (StopMeasurements and StartMeasurements are the key thing you should search for). Now, you go home and second day you come you go to your CM Server and see the log file, and it has been reached around 32 MB! And when you open it you find too many Threshold entries and when you start looking at those threshold entries sometime you get Images/Pages in Threshold log entries. You go to that images/pages and you find that they are normal.

Now, at this point of time you are confused about accuracy of the data provided (even we too was in same dilemma!). Okay so let me share our findings on it.

Basically the way this feature has been architect-ed it will not work on real production environment, as on real production environment you will have more than one requests served by a single request and it will lead us to inaccurate data.

Item, memory and timing thresholds in Sitecore only provide accurate data in testing scenarios with a single visitor accessing the site. These threshold warnings can be useful when evaluating the performance of a specific page when accessed by a single user. In production environments, however, when many people are accessing the site, these warnings reflect the activity of many users and, as a result, do not provide useful information from a performance monitoring perspective. As a result, Sitecore recommends disabling these warning messages so that log files do not  become unnecessarily cluttered.

This message appears in Sitecore logs due to the Sitecore architecture. Generally, such messages are very important in development and testing environment when tests are performed in single request mode. There is a single counter for measuring the number of accessed items. At the beginning of a request the value of the counter is stored and subtracted from the value of the same counter after finishing the item rendering. The result is the number of items accessed during the request. If two or more requests are handled simultaneously, accessing item attempts overlap and the number of accessed items may be incorrect. The same holds true for the memory and time threshold. However, when you are repeatedly confronted with such warnings for a particular page, this may indicate that you need to review its logic and perform a detailed investigation in the single request mode with special tools, such as Sitecore Debugger or smth. like dotTrace profiler

Source : http://sdn.sitecore.net/faq/troubleshooting/item%20threshold%20exceeded%20for%20web%20page.aspx

So, In short you should use Threshold on Local/Test environment and if you find any URLs which are exceeding thresholds then only you should investigate those items further. And always Disable Thresholds on production environment. How to do it? Above link explains it? and also below link is good to read:

http://sitecoreblog.alexshyba.com/2009/07/item-memory-and-timing-thresholds.html

Also, Feel free to modify your Threshold values on Local/Test environment as per your solution architecture.

Webliography:

http://sdn.sitecore.net/forum//ShowPost.aspx?PostID=10551
http://sdn.sitecore.net/forum//ShowPost.aspx?PostID=15722
http://sdn.sitecore.net/forum//ShowPost.aspx?PostID=15091

Happy Threshold Debugging!

* QIS is Case-Insensitive!

Main Features

• Cross-Browser compatible : It works on all browsers which Sitecore supports!
• Compatible Sitecore versions : Sitecore 6.X
• No need to have Lucene indexing enabled:- Sitecore provides search which works on Lucene search indexing results. If you have disabled Lucene indexing for your Sitecore instance for performance then Sitecore’s default search will not work. But Quick Item Search will!
• Token support : It support tokens for items which you access frequently! And you can always extend them!

How to Download and Install?

• You can download package from here
• Install that package using Sitecore’s Installation Wizard from Sitecore Desktop. (It will copy one DLL to bin folder, does the couple of entries in core DB, and copies command file in your App_Config folder)

[Just a note : This installation will cause application pool to restart. So, better you install it on live system in Out of office hours].

• Once installation is done you can start using it from Home ribbon.
• That’s it! Enjoy!

Screen shots

• Following screen shows QuickItemSearch has searched an Item by Item’s ID and loaded it in CE.

How it works?

Technically it works on only one method – Sitecore.Context.Database.GetItem()

I would like to hear from you

If your feedback is positive tell to your peers else tell to me at : klpatil@hotmail.com. Feel free to post your suggestions/comments/bugs at provided email id.

Happy Quick Item Searching!