Professional Sitecore Development

Chapter 6

Optimizing, Scaling, and Troubleshooting

What's in This Chapter?

Capitalizing on caching

Scaling your solution

Virtualizing your instances

Edge caching and content delivery networks

Architecting for high availability

Planning hardware capacity

Monitoring and improving performance

Diagnosing problems and debugging

Understanding the web.config file

Disassembling .NET assemblies

This chapter contains invaluable information that you can use to scale, troubleshoot, and optimize the performance of your Sitecore solution. Beginning with a detailed description of the layered Sitecore caching architecture, it continues to explain how you can monitor and tune the size of each cache.

The next section introduces concepts that you can use to scale your Sitecore solution to meet high visitor traffic loads in the content delivery environment and high concurrent user loads in the content management environment, which also increases the reliability of that solution. This section touches on virtualization, edge caching, and content delivery networks (CDNs).

Next, this chapter provides techniques that you can use to troubleshoot your Sitecore solution, such as monitoring the contents of the Sitecore log files, configuring performance thresholds, and debugging. The final section contains information about options for furthering your understanding of the product, such as by investigating the root /web.config file, Web.config include files, stack traces, and how to reflect upon and disassemble ...