Today something happened to our DNN website, and the homepage became very slow.
After accessing the homepage and clicking in the menu to access any other page, those load fast, but when clicking again on homepage, it loads extremely slow. It takes approximately 22 seconds to load.
The site is using DotNetNuke 6.0 Community version.
I logged in as host and tried "Clear Cache" and "Recycle Application Pool" under Tools and didn't help.
What else can I try?
Is there anything I should do regularly to maintain the performance of a DNN website?

Thanks,
Steven

Is this a "first page load" kind of problem, or does it occur every time the home page loads?

It was every time when I clicked back on the home page, even after I logged in, and accessed other pages, those were fast, but when I clicked on home page again, it was slow.
Finally I restarted the server before getting into too much troubleshooting, and it was fast again I guess Windows servers need to be restarted sometime.
Do you think it was anything related to cache or log files? Any of those clear up after restarting the server? I tried Recycle Application Pool and it didn't help before that.

Thanks,
Steven

Really answering your question would require some troubleshooting. It could be one of the items you mention, and it could be others. Is your home page also larger than other pages?

Yes, it is a little bit larger, because it has more small modules, but now when is working fine, there is not an obious difference in loading time compared to other pages.

Did your home page continue to behave after restarting the server?

Yes, it is still fast since that time.

Thanks,
Steven

Today the home page became slow again. It takes 23 seconds to load, while the rest of the pages take around 1 second, some less than 1 second.
I analyzed with Firebug, there is a Net tab, which shows a timeline. I am not sure how can that tool help me to identify the problem. The very first line shows the URL Home.aspx, status "200 OK", domain, then size = 66.5KB, the IP and the timeline = 22.82s
The rest of the lines are lots of CSS files, javascript files, some GIF files, but all show very small times under the timeline column, less than 100ms each.
I can expand the Home.aspx URL and it shows "Headers", "Response", "Cache" and "HTML" columns.
Anybody could tell me if I could use this tool to pin-point the problem? Or any other tool?
I don't think the size of the webpage is too big (66.5KB), since I tried another page which is 56KB and loads in 734ms (less than a second).
I tried to log in as host and cleared the cache (under Tools) and "Recycle Application Pool", but didn't help.

Actually while I was logged in as host, the Home page loaded in 1.73s (probably that is the ideal speed), but after logging out and clicking again on home page, it loaded again in 22.71s

Probably at the end I will just restart the server again and it will fix it, but I thought we could determine the root of the problem.
Also interesting that it is the first time that it happened again since my last post (last year)

Thanks.

Another thing I tried in IIS on the server:
- stopped the website
- stopped the application pool associated
- monitored with Performance Monitor (added the counter from Performance Object = Web Service, Counter = Current Connections for the instance = my website name) - somehow this showed still 6 connections even thought the app pool and site were stopped at this point
- started the app pool
- started the website
- tried to load a webpage other than the home page - took 1min 10sec (normal after restarting the app pool)
- tried to load the home page - took 23s
- tried the previous page again - took 1.39s this time


Next I tried this from command line:
> cmd /c iisreset /stop /noforce
After about half minute waiting I got this error:
Attempting stop...
Stop attempt failed.
The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.
(2147943453, 8007041d)
Under Services it showed Stopping for "World Wide Web Publishing Service", then finally it stopped.
- Under Perfmon, Current Connections showed a line this time
- Started the "World Wide Web Publishing Service"
- tried a page other than Home page - I was surprised that it loaded very fast (less than a second), not 1min 10sec like last time
- tried the home page - loaded again in 22.76s

Anything else I could try? I guess I will end up restarting the server again.

Thanks.