Paul Galvin's SharePoint space [SharePoint MVP]

This past week, someone asked a question about creating a SharePoint environment that would handle a pretty high volume of new documents (10,000 +/- in this case).  I don't know much about this, but thanks to this white paper, I feel much better informed.

For me, this white paper is pretty much just a book mark at the moment, but I did start reading through it and thought I'd highlight my main take-away.  SharePoint can be scaled to handle, at a minimum, this load:

• 50k new documents per day.
• 10 million documents total.

I write the 50k/10MM figures because they are easy enough to remember.  As long as you know they are minimums, you won't get into trouble.  The maximums are at least 10 percent higher than that and with extreme tuning, possibly a lot higher.

Thanks, Mike Walsh, once again for his weekly WSS FAQ updates and corrections post.  If you're not subscribed to it, you should seriously think about doing it.

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We've been working in a user acceptance testing (UAT) environment which, as compared to development, is dead slow.

It's a complicated environment using FBA, SQL 2008, SSRS and extended web applications accessible over the internet using https, so it's been hard to track down the issue.

For a previous client, we used FBA with an LDAP role provider (and membership provider).  One of my colleagues, far more clever than I, determined that the "out of the box" LDAP role provider, when used in that environment, wasn't scaling well.  To solve this problem for that client, he implemented a nice caching scheme in a custom role provider. 

This situation seemed similar, so we looked into replicating that solution to the today's client.  As I was debugging that, I noticed that this message would frequently appear in the System log (from Event Viewer):

A worker process with process id of 'XXX' serving application pool 'Home - 80' has requested a recycle because it reached its virtual memory limit. 

I took this to mean that the app pool was recycling far, far too often and that would explain a performance problem.

I looked at the app pool's properties and its "Recycling" page showed that the property "Maximum virtual memory (in megabytes)" had been set to true and had been set to 5000.  That seems like enough, but I decided to unset the value and that had an immediate positive effect.  No more app pool recycling.  No more mysterious slow-downs and pauses.

I don't really understand the underlying "stuff" that's going on there, but clearly some kind of cause/effect thing is happening and for now, the UAT environment is usable.

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My colleague (Natalya Voskresenskaya) and I will be speaking at the Fairfield/Westchester SharePoint User Group meeting at 6:00 PM on 07/16 (Wednesday).  We are talking about the content query web part.  This is the same (but improved version that we gave to New York in May).

Pre-register here: https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=129626&wa=wsignin1.0

Natalya and I hope to see you there!

Here's the email Richard Martzelle just sent out on the subject:

Topic:  Using Content Query Web Part to Create Business Solutions

Speakers: Paul Galvin & Natalya Voskresenskaya

Date: July 16^th Welcome Time: (Eat & Network): 6:00PM   Time: 6:30 PM -8:00PM

Meeting Description

MOSS 2007's Content Query Web Part (CQWP) enables users to create custom views of data queried from many sources, and present that data in one place. Despite its powerful query & content refinement options, CQWP is often an underrated and overlooked feature. CQWP is both a "data extraction engine" (find documents or list items anywhere in a site collection) and also a first-class presentation tool that enables users to control how content is presented by wrapping HTML and styles to format the display nearly any way you wish.

In this demo-heavy session, they will show how to use the CQWP to solve business problems by showing off core features

• use default CWQP features, including audience targeting

• use CWQP as a reporting tool anywhere in a site collection via filter criteria such as "all documents created today"

• change look & feel of query results to highlight business data, show additional columns of information, display information in a grid format, and others

• show how CQWP can aid in content type administration (i.e. find all documents of a particular content type so as to understand potential impact of changing a CT definition)

• describe some limitations of CQWP

• provide a list of resources for advanced CQWP techniques, including blogs, ECQWP Codeplex project & MSDN documentation

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This morning, Microsoft emailed to tell me I have given the Microsoft MVP award! It's a lot to take in all at once.  When I've had a chance to properly reflect, I'll share more of my thoughts on the whole thing.  I know it's a subject of great interest to a lot of people.  I'm bursting with excitement.  The SharePoint MVP crew is a great group of men and women dedicated to building and expanding the community.  I've only met a handful and look forward to meeting more and helping to expand and improve community resources over the coming year.  It's going to be a while ride...

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I attended my first ever SharePoint conference this past weekend and it was a blast. 

Thursday afternoon, I drove down to Virginia, guided by my newly purchased $50 GPS appliance plug-in thing to my phone.  The device was flawless.  After the five hour drive, I had the energy to do a nice run on the tread mill and then, even more surprisingly, had the energy to head to the lobby for an advertised speaker's cocktail hour.  Conference n00b that I am, it turned out that the cocktail hour was really a ruse to get speakers to show up and help stuff papers and swag into shoulder bags for conference attendees :) 

Had a hard time sleeping because I was speaking first thing Friday AM.  Nervousness, a nagging feeling that I needed to add a slide to my presentation and a very disturbing cat show on Animal Planet kept me up late.  Since I went to sleep late, I naturally got up early.  I did add a fairly detailed technical architecture slide.  It was well worth the effort because the 25 minutes of Q&A would have been very awkward without it.  I was lucky to get the first slot in the technical track.  Sahil Malik was originally going to speak Friday AM and I was going to speak Saturday but he needed to swap times.  This allowed me to do my presentation and then sit back and enjoy everything going forward Friday and Saturday.

The presentation went OK.  I definitely have room to improve it.  I spoke about how we can access and use web services from a SharePoint Designer workflow using a custom action.  Over time, I will tie this information into my series over at EUSP.com for End Users trying to get the most use out of that tool.  I blew through my slides and demo in 35 minutes, to my dismay at the time.  Luckily, Q&A was lively, no doubt helped by the fact that it was early morning before lunch.  Q&A is my favorite part of any presentation. 

There were many interesting subjects and I hope to blog about them in greater detail this week (time permitting, as always).  A fellow from CMS Watch provided a highly critical yet very hopeful review of SharePoint's position in the market.  A different discussion focused on the paucity of SharePoint resources and the difficulty that recruiters have finding good talent that is also "affordable" in this very tight market.  The CMS Watch guy referred to the SharePoint human resources pool as being like a "guild."  I'm mainly familiar with that term in MMORPG terms and it gave me a little thrill, to be honest :) 

The highlight of the conference was just meeting and catching up with people I've "known" online for a while.  The best was sitting at the bar with Becky Isserman (MossLover) for 3 or 4 hours (and that, after I had finished drinking for the night).  I don't often get to talk about Farscape or Babylon 5 with Kansas City residents.

Bob Fox was there and as usual, is a whirlwind of intros, chats and just plain frenetic energy.  He invited me to Saturday breakfast with Sahil Malik and that was great. 

Saturday (day 2), Mike Lotter dragged himself to the conference to speak about InfoPath and then he joined Becky at the end of the day to do a sort of general Q&A session for about 30 to 45 minutes mainly focused on InfoPath (Mike) and AJAX (Becky).  I wish Becky had been able to go through her full/formal presentation but I'm sure I'll get a chance to see that one of these days.  I have a feeling she'll be "hitting the circuit" going forward.

I could go on and on.  Two last points -- the financial purpose of the conference was to raise money for the Children's Miracle Network and it raised $5,000.  That was awesome.  Finally, I want to publicly thank Gary Blatt, Gary Vaughn and Bob Fox for alerting me to and allowing me to speak at the conference.  Of course, the two Gary's had a team of people supporting and organizing and all of you were awesome.  I had high expectations before I went and it was better than I had hoped for.

Keep on the alert for the next conference scheduled for November 7th and 8th.  Aside from some great content, it's terrific for meeting up with all those online personalities you've known through blogs, twitter, forums, etc. 

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