Top 10 Reasons SharePoint May Be Running Slowly

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Microsoft's SharePoint is a web application framework you may be using in your enterprise or organization to create web pages or to enable collaboration through its content and document management capabilities.

Running slowly is a common performance issue associated with SharePoint.

Sluggish page loads obviously waste a user's time, but these can translate into other issues when latency issues become business productivity problems.

SharePoint Design Problems

Why could SharePoint be running slowly?

There are several possible reasons, but the primary problem we've identified -- based on our extensive experience troubleshooting SharePoint for clients -- is bad design.

We're not referring to problems with scaling -- staffing or budget changes over time that may result in changes to how SharePoint is used within the organization. Some people use the jargon "architected" to describe design, and that's what we're talking about here.

Poor design causes a host of SharePoint performance problems, especially if these issues aren't considered from the moment of implementation. You want to look at very fundamental issues first, for instance, whether the hardware resources allocated for SharePoint adequately match your use patterns.         

As Microsoft's Pav Cherny notes: 

In an ideal world, you would account for SharePoint performance optimization in the planning and design stages with adequately sized and architected servers, support teams, and underlying infrastructure. But in the real world, you'll have trouble predicting user adoption rates. Your budget may be cut or staff downsized. You may inherit a poorly performing SharePoint environment. Even if your infrastructure at first meets performance expectations, growing numbers of documents, groups, lists, and sites may increase page load times and decrease satisfaction.

The best solution to your performance problems is going to the source. Microsoft offers numerous basic resources, including recommendations for hardware, software, and server farm architecture. For example, if your organization is running its entire farm on a single server, adding servers may resolve the issues. 

After consulting Microsoft's SharePoint 2010 Technical Diagrams, you may wish to re-architect and reconfigure the system to ensure it is running optimally. 

SharePoint File Interdepencies

A related issue is failing to fully account for and understand interdependencies between the core technologies and files. Again, this can be a hardware issue. Some latency can be the result of interrelated components not working together as intended.

Microsoft's Cherny suggests carefully analyzing any available data before making changes. Once you fully understand the sequence of events leading to the issue, he suggests you can "correlate events to determine the underlying root cause." 

What's Next?

These issues are among the 10 leading issues causing SharePoint slowing and related performance problems. More comprehensive information is provided in our Top 10 Reasons SharePoint is Running Slowly white paper, designed to help you troubleshoot your sluggish system. 

In our white paper, we discuss the 10 primary issues we've identified based on our experience working with enterprises of varying sizes. The paper also provides some ideas for troubleshooting that assume you have a working knowledge of SharePoint as well as the Microsoft ecosystem. 

You may want a thorough evaluation of your organization's network. Our Database experts can diagnose and resolve performance issues that will help your organization's network run more effectively and efficiently. 

If you'd like to know more about our custom Database outsourcing services and how we can help with your SharePoint operations, please contact Datavail. 

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With more than 10 years of IT Industry experience and eight years in SharePoint alone, Owens has a deep knowledge in SharePoint including versions 2001/2003/2007/2010/2013. He brings in a blend of strong administration and development skills, contributing to holistic view of SharePoint.