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Why does it take forever for SharePoint to load sometimes?

richard — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 16:51:50 +0000

SharePoint is built on ASP.NET technology. Applications hosted through IIS, (like an ASP.NET website or SharePoint) must initially be compiled before being sent to the user. This is a process called Just-In-Time compilation. Application Pools within IIS are responsible for execution of applications (like SharePoint) they manage resources like memory, and invoke JIT compilation, as well as other services like caching. Applications Pools will naturally shut down if left idle as to free up resources no longer needed. Application Pools will also occasionally recycle or restart if memory thresholds are reached. In these cases, the Application Pool must initiate JIT compilation of hosted applications as well as begin allocating resources when a request for the application is received again. The user requesting the application for the first time will experience a delay while the Application Pool compiles the site and makes it available for servicing. Subsequent requests for the application do not occur this overhead. To prevent users from ever experiencing this delay, warm up jobs or scripts are created to request sites running on an IIS server periodically or before demand is expected. The initial delay in startup of an application pool still occurs, but the experience of a delay now occurs in a command prompt running as a scheduled task, not a user’s browser.

SharePoint 2010 Document Coauthoring

richard — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 22:08:43 +0000

Document co-authoring is a new feature within SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Office Word, OneNote and PowerPoint 2010. When multiple users edit a document on a SharePoint site, changes saved back while editing are available to other users also editing the document.

This functionality can be disabled by checking out the document before editing. Users can individually check out documents as a way to lock them, so other users cannot co-author with them. Co-authoring requires that check-out not be required on any document library used for co-authoring documents. Requiring check-out in a document library is one way to disable co-authoring for the whole library. Co-authoring functionality can also be disabled on the client side using Group Policy.

IIS 7 Worker Processes

richard — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 21:45:16 +0000

Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager 7 includes a very nifty feature called Worker Processes. This feature will allow you to see information about the Worker Processes (w3wp.exe) for the sites running on the server. If you’ve ever run Task Manager on your server and see several w3wp.exe processes killing your machine (high CPU usage), this is where you want to go. This feature will identify the Process ID of the Worker Processes and also tell you the associated application pool, very helpful in telling you which sites are killing your server.

You can also click into the worker process and view the current requests that are being processed, including the current requested url, client ip, and the time elapsed for the request. Again, very helpful information.

To access this feature, click on Start and then the Run command. Type in inetmgr to launch the IIS Manager Console. In the left pane “Connections” click on your server. On the right pane, you’ll have the feature view. There’s a section called IIS, and one of the last icons should be labeled, “Worker Processes”. Double click, and it will display all the current worker processes. Double click on a process and you’ll see the current requests. You can repeatedly click “Show All” to refresh.

Empty Div With Width Displays Height in IE

richard — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 19:01:48 +0000

I have a wrapper div that contains a user control that may or may not always display content. If it doesn’t have content, then the div should be empty and empty divs shouldn’t have any height right? Well, all the browsers agree with me – except Internet Explorer. Apparently since I’ve given this div a width, even though its empty, IE still decides to render height equivalent to the set font-size.

So can’t I just add a height:0; rule to my css? Well that will work – until the control within my div decides to render content and now its hidden.

So the fix? Add an html comment within the div. Yep, sounds crazy – but if your empty div is empty, save for an html comment, it will now not render any height.

Here’s how the fix looks like:

CSS – Select adjacent element

richard — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 18:36:12 +0000

So, I had a table row with two table cells. The first cell had an class attribute, so I could style it easy enough, but the second table cell had no such class or ID and I need it to style it as well. It should also be noted that i had no means to change the generated html!

Search around a bit and found the CSS adjacent selector. This nifty operator allows me to target the second child within a specified parent. So in my case, the parent was the table row which had an ID, and the children where the two table cells (one with a class and another without). So to get to the second table cell I was able to do: