.Sitecore

Yesterday we had a serious issue with one of the improved layout for a release 2 of one of our projects. As it really became a show stopper for 2 of my colleagues I decided to give it the highest priority. While debugging I came to the conclusion I wasn’t really following a straight path. Just ‘doing something’. So 10 minutes ago I wrote down the most of the steps taken and I want to share them with you. So you can debug your apps in a way better way.

Usefull requirements for debugging:

• Always try to have a read-only acocunt to the production environment. I know it’s  from a security point of view not always a good choice, but when it remains read-only, it won’t harm your production environment ever.
• Make sure you’ve got a quite clean machine. A SQL Server 2005 with CLR Support will make your results less obvious. Same goes out to BizTalk, multiple webservers, etc. So try to isolate your problem.

Steps to take:

1. Identify where the issue is
   1. Walk trough your logfiles. Are there any warning such as:
      

      2572 10:43:30 WARN  Timing threshold exceeded for web page. Milliseconds: 30436,72. Threshold: 1000. Page URL: /Sitemap.aspx
      2572 10:43:30 WARN  Item threshold exceeded for web page. Items accessed: 8940. Threshold: 1000. Page URL: /Sitemap.aspx

   2. Run the Sitecore debugger and tracer
   3. Enable and disable sublayouts and renderings
   4. In some cases you’ve to select another Layout/Masterpage
   5. When you can’t find anything, just attach Visual Studio to your ASP.NET-process, reload the page and wait for exceptions/overflows. When this doesn’t help, use the debugger-pause button and manually step trough your code.
2. So now you’ve identiefied where the issue is you general got 2 options, XSLT or code. For both I’ve some hints as well:
   • XSLT
     • Find out if you aren’t running trough to many levels of items.
     • Try to minimize your amount of data used.
     • XPath, Axes and predicates are extremely heavy get rid of them!
     • Make sure you made the right choice when using developing this functionality.
     • Are you using caching? Is this functionality cachable?
   • Code
     • Using Sitecore Query? Read this post by Sitecore’s Kim Hornung on Query performence.
     • Are there any haevy operation such as connections/regexp/data convert(e.g. XmlDoc construction)
     • Is your code accessed once or more often? Aren’t you databinding twice per pageview for example?
     • Use SectionTimers to divide your page in clear pieces.

Happy debugging!