Best Practices to Improve Performance for SharePoint 2007 Sites

Some of the best practices for using Publishing Site are:

1. Keep Files UnCustomized - Try to keep your
files UnCustomized or on the server. Avoid editing them in SharePoint designer
or by using SharePoint API if not needed. Customizing the files can cost you
alot in terms of Performance and space as every Customized or Unghosted file in
is subjected to safe mode parser.Its basically, a little Check to see that
everything on the Page is allowed to run in SharePoint.


2. Avoid adding lot of WebParts on a single Page
-
Check the closed webparts on your page and make sure you delete
them.

3. Memory Management-
Always, Dispose SPSIte and SPWeb Objects if you have created them in your code.
You can employ certain coding techniques to ensure object disposal. These
techniques include using the following in your code:

* Dispose
method

* using clause

* try, catch, and finally blocks

Note
: SPContext objects are managed by the SharePoint framework and should not be
explicitly disposed in your code. This is true also for the SPSite and SPWeb
objects returned by SPContext.Site, SPContext.Current.Site, SPContext.Web, and
SPContext.Current.Web.


4. Reduce the
Page Payload
- SharePoint Page loads a lot of images from _layouts or
other various paths which can make the Page load a slow process. To avoid this
Payload you can use clustering or stitching, which combines multiple images into
a single image file. You can then use CSS to clip parts of the image, giving
users the impression that multiple images are being used.

5. Enable output caching for a site collection
-
For each page request for which an output cached version of a page is
served, the server does not have to:
* Make a round trip to the database to
fetch the source code for the .aspx page and any .ascx controls on the
page.
* Reload and re-render the controls.
* Requery any data sources that
the controls rely on for data.
However, Output caching consumes additional
memory. Each version of a page consumes memory on the Web client.When used with
two or more front-end Web servers, output caching may affect consistency.