Hi there, We are having a massive problem with incredibly slow user logins on our site. After clicking the login button it can take anything up to a minute for a user to be sent to our homepage. The frustrating thing is that if after clicking login you then immediately use the navigation you are taken to the chosen page and you are logged in. I have used Fiddler (http://www.fiddler2.com) to track the HTTP requests and it is showing “home.aspx” as a page request almost immediately after clicking login, yet the home page only loads 30-60 seconds later. What could be causing this delay between the request and the render? We are running DNN Community Edition 05.04.01 (26) . Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks, Donovan

Update: The issue is intermittent and I am wondering if it has something to do with application pooling and the site “going to sleep”. Although I have the KeepAlive.aspx page open on another machine and it is refreshing correctly. If I log out then log in again it’s quick, maybe 5 seconds, and remains quick if I keep logging in and logging out. Then all of a sudden it crawls again.

Update: After speaking to our hosting company this morning they are saying that DNN was hitting the server memory limit (500mb) and therefore resetting the application pool. This would make sense to me as it would explain why the site runs perfectly for about 10 minutes and then is slow before running well again, all down to the site having to reload into the application pool after each reset. They seem to feel that increasing the memory to 1000mb it will solve the problem but my concern is that we may have a memory leak somewhere and it will simply use the 1000mb as it has used up the 500mb... we obviously can’t keep throwing memory at the server. Does anyone have any idea on how much memory DNN needs, or uses, typically? How can I find out how much memory my current installation is using? Is there a setting in host that can be adjusted to monitor/maintain DNN’s memory usage? Thanks, Donovan

I am not aware of any memory leaks.  Of course, you could have a module installed that does.

The amount of memory needed will depend on modules that are installed.  To minimize memory, I'd recommend that you uninstall modules that you are not using.  You can get a list of what is and what isn't being used from the Host's Dashboard.

The amount of memory assigned is not something that can be controlled inside of DotNetNuke as that is an IIS function.  But, 512 MB out to be sufficient.

Hi Joseph, When setting up the site I only installed the modules we required. The site does run Active Social and Active Forums and all pages have the Active Social “Welcome Centre” on them. In the periods between the application pool resetting the site runs very well but obviously if it keeps falling over every 10 minutes the application pool is being reloaded it doesn’t matter how well it runs in between ;-) Our hosting company seem to feel that a 1000mb will do the trick... so I think we’re going to go ahead and let them upgrade it and see how it goes. Is there anything else that could obviously be wrong and cause the site to slow to a crawl periodically like that? I’d like to think it’s server related and not something I may have changed in DNN.

Update: After speaking with our hosting company and having them monitor the server whilst logging in the memory usage spiked by as much as 30mb on login for one user. Can you recommend a company who specialise in DNN who may be able to take a look at our Host and Portal settings to make sure there is nothing causing this issue, and also help to fine tune our setup?

Don,

If you want to contact me privately using the form at patapscorg.com, I may be able to help you or put you in touch with someone who can.

Hi Joe, I have completed the form and hope to be in touch with you shortly. The memory upgrade was completed last night and has not helped the problem, so I think we can safely conclude it is a problem with our DNN configuration. Thanks, Donovan

I have spent some time logging in and logging out of the site and recording the times. Like clockwork of the last hour and a half the site has gone from being fast and responsive to having a 1minute period of being slow.

Are there any tools, client side as we’re still trying to get our hosting company to help find this issue, which we can use to try and find out what event is occurring approximately every 6 minutes that’s slowing the site down?

Surely there must be an indication in the server event log which will show it resetting an application pool or something? This “event” is happening to regularily to not be noticed?

Our DNN site and event logs are only showing the successful logins and related activity. There is nothing to indicate a scheduled event or something from the DNN config performing a restart or reset.

As an aside the slow login is still successful... it just takes a minute to complete. So could this suggest it is not an application pool issue, or would the submitted login information be paged until after the pool has restarted and then be served to the application?

If the application is restarting, you certainly should see that in the Event Log.

I assume you mean the IIS event log? As there is nothing in the DNN "Event Viewer" or "Site Log"

I meant the DotNetNuke event log.  Restarts are logged there.

Problem solved! Turns out that it was the DNN News Feeds module which was getting headlines from a feed that had over 2300 items in it. This feed basically had news items appended to it daily with no purging of older items. So the file size was well over 400kb. We had the cache time set to 5 minutes and that correlates to the reason why every 7 minutes, or so, the login would grind to a halt. It was because the feed cache was being emptied and then re-populated from an XML file that was huge. As a result of the homepage being the default page after login it explains why it seemed that logins were the problem. With that module having been on the site since launch it was always going to be the last suspect... so a huge thank you must go to Joe who tracked it down for me!

We are having similar issues. our site is www.belmopancityonline.com Below is what our hosting provider said:

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We have found that the root cause of this issue is that your Worker 
Process memory consumption exceeds 180MB (Goes above 195MB and 200MB), 
when this is the case, it is ended/killed by the server because 
anything over 180MB is not acceptable when using our Shared Hosting Services.

Once a Worker Process is recycled/killed, it has to recompile in the 
ASP.NET engine, which generally takes around 30-60 seconds which explains the
slowness you're experiencing

There are a few options you have to correct this issue:

A) Make changes to your site/application to reduce your overall memory 
consumption. This may be caused by an application/module/skin on your 
site that has poor coding/garbage collection that causes your memory 
usage to skyrocket.

B) Move to a virtual server where these memory limitations would not 
be in place since you have your own resources (Memory, CPU, Disk) are 
all dedicated to you only and would not impact other customers. You 
will have other benefits like being able to install 
applications/components on the server you normally wouldn't with shared hosting services

<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]-->

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Any suggestions? we have news feeds but they are all from within the site and get updated every 2 days.

Make sure that you have uninstalled modules that you aren't actually using.  That will reduce the memory footprint some.

But, that is one of the issues with shared hosting ...