SharePoint Best Practices Chat with Spencer Harbar
Background:
I met Spencer Harbar (SharePoint MVP) at the 2009 MVP Summit. My friend AC introduced us. Spencer and Andrew both recently spoke at the European SharePoint Best Practices Conference. Spencer was kind enough to take a few minutes to chat about his slide deck he made available. The following is a transcript of our conversation:
Spence says:
http://www.harbar.net/archive/2009/02/19/sharepoint-best-practices-presentations.aspx
dbottjer says:
ok, so for SSP's
your saying that a common myth is that the SSP should be on a deadicated box?
even in a load balanced situation
I've always done what I think you’re suggesting which is place on all web front ends.
Is that correct?
Spence says:
yeah
so that's basically what i am saying
you have no choice but for the SSP Admin site to run on all WFEs
because it's a regular Web App
it's not possible to have it on a specific box
dbottjer says:
ok, can you explain the statement “…placement of DCs is far more important instead of one dc for every three WFE.”
what do you mean by placement?
Spence says:
so this is how "far away" DCs are from the SP Farm
in other words you need a DC on the same subnet as the SP boxes
dbottjer says:
ok
Spence says:
and forget about the whole 1 DC per 3 WFEs
don't get me wrong
if you have a heavy use SP Farm then you *MAY* need additional DCs
but as a general rule of thumb, there is no rule of thumb
dbottjer says:
So that recommendation is like a you can't go wrong with 1 DC for every 3 WFE but it is the no thought approach.
Spence says:
yup
it's bad advise
because often those machines end up doing nothing
dbottjer says:
how do you test stuff like that
Spence says:
stick it in a lab
and also measure in production
dbottjer says:
What tools to measure?
Spence says:
lsas.sys had a bunch of perf counters
authN requests a second and all that type of stuff
plus the usual CPU, Network, Vmem etc
dbottjer says:
so the magic number thing
This is something I've looked at myself
so take the 2000 items per folder
Spence says:
i feel a nightmare coming on
dbottjer says:
there nothing coded into SharePoint that says you can't go beyond it's just a guideline.
Spence says:
correct
dbottjer says:
but seems like 2000 comes up often
Spence says:
2k is the point where the performance of the *default view* begins to suffer
dbottjer says:
l2k is like a sweet spot and the default view is the key
Spence says:
as having 2k items displayed in a grid is really daft (in any platform)
yup
dbottjer says:
and it really has to do with iteration correct?
Spence says:
yup
that code is a managed wrapped for a COM component
u can have way more than 2k items in a list
it's just the view that causes problems
which is basically the same as if u had a asp.net form displaying 2k items from a DB on one page
without paging etc
Conclusion
Spencer I would like to again thank you for taking the time to answer my questions. I hope others will benefit from this posting of our chat.
Thanks,
Dennis