A Practical Guide to Reduce Net Page Load Time

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;Web Server Optimization

Once you have optimized your indexes run SQL Profiler again to check what kind of activity you are having on your SQL server.

The way you partition your database across drives on your SQL server can help if you are suffering from high disk utilization.; The following configuration has worked well for me note that each partition is on a separate physical drive:C: Operating System and SQL executablesD: Database File - RAID 5E: SQL Log FilesF: Temp DatabaseG: Backups

Web Server OptimizationSince almost every page the typical Internet retailer website has will make some type of database connection, your bottleneck will probably be retrieving data from SQL.; If this is the case you probably won't need to do much optimization for your web server.; Generally speaking you will want to make sure the server has plenty of CPU, memory, and disk resources available to your web server.; Increasing memory to allow more web page caching (see caching section of this article) is one area you can really boost page load time.; Additionally if you find your disk having problems keeping up try some of the following:1 Add memory and increase caching2 If you have logging enabled, move the log file locations to another drive.3 Make sure your web pages are being loaded from a RAID 5 partition.

If you currently run a single server, determine what resources are lacking, probably disk or memory, maybe CPU and what is using these resources.; Typically when moving from a single server to multiple servers you will put in a new server and only put your database on that new server.

Another popular method is to setup multiple SQL servers (assuming this is the main bottleneck) with separate data.; For instance if you keep your images in SQL, you may want to move them to they're own server then make a connection to one server for some of your data and to the other server for retrieving images.

Web Page Design

CachingCaching is one way to drastically reduce page load time, especially for popular pages.; Even if your page is dynamic, you may be able to cache it for 4 hours or at least 15 min.;

You can enable browser caching by using the HTML Expires heading for any pages that can cache.; This type of caching tells the visitors browser that if it returns to this exact page it's doesn't need to go back to the web server and retrieve the page again.; This will help when people are browsing your site and come back to the same page multiple times.; If the page is more static, like an article page for instance, you may be able to set it to cache for 30 days.; This will allow the same person to go to that page different days without having to hit your server.; The downfall of this caching is that it only helps if people visit your page more than once within the caching time.

Another type of caching is server side page caching.; This allows you to cache a page on the server instead of the browser, therefore when defining the caching time, anyone that requests the page inside of the cache time will receive the cached page.; Server side caching will allow your web server to cache the page in memory (given there are enough memory resources available) which means it does not have to go to the disk to retrieve the page or query the database.; Let's say for example the front page of your website has a tree view menu that makes multiple database queries to build the page.; If this page is requested many times an hour it will generate a lot of resource strain on your servers.; If you set this page to cache for 15 min. you now only create that resource strain once every 15 min. allowing your server to respond better to other requests and your page will display much faster.; Of all the things you can do to make your site faster, this may have the biggest impact.;