Page Diagnostics Tool for SPO

What is Page Diagnostics Tool?

Defined as Chromium Browser Extension designed to help you identify site pages in SharePoint Online that may not be delivering optimal performance.

Where we can download the tool?

• Page Diagnostics Tool can be downloaded from here
• This tool can be also installed through chrome browser store

What can can be used for?

1. Compare characteristics of page to best practices to SharePoint Online and enlist the issues
2. Provide guidance to resolve these issues as per the best practices

What This Tool does?

• Identify total page load time
• Which actions needs attention
  1. It detects large images (Images which are larger than 300 KB)
  2. Content Delivery Network check – Which items from page are not using CDN
  3. How many request call went to SharePoint? It also indicates how many only to have like best practice is maximum 25
  4. Which web parts are using iFrames? iFrames slows down the performance
  5. Which web parts affecting performance
  6. Where improvements can be done. That means for example this tool enlists WebParts which take more than 2000 MS to render

It’s interesting to analyze performance of modern and classic sites before publishing them to production environments

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Azure Front Door

Azure Front Door enables to enhance the performance of interactive services such as Office 365 and Bing. What? I am reading well?

Front Door is an entry point into the Microsoft WAN that is deployed in edge sites around the world. When you connect to a service that Front Door is enhancing, you enter the Microsoft WAN through the closest (AnyCast) edge site and, from there, you connect to the closest available (probe tested) instance or replica of the service via the Microsoft WAN.

So… once I pass the Azure Front Door is like being in the same network as Microsoft, whooooo!!

We can think as Front Door as a global load balancing for our subscription, but what other services are offered inside this service?

• URL redirection
• Session affinity
• SSL termination
• Security via customer WAF rules and DDoS protection
• URL rewrite
• IPv6 and HTTP/2 support

The matter here is when to use this service, probably does not fit all customers, but think in customers that have several offices around the world, where latency and performance to access to services is critical.

Enabling Blob Cache in SharePoint 2013

One thing you can do to improve the performance of your SharePoint farm is enabling the Blob Cache. Also this operation is a best practice as I stated some time ago in: https://sharepointrescue.wordpress.com/2015/08/27/fine-tune-sharepoint-performance/

But, what is Blob Cache? Is disk-based cache that controls the caching for binary large objects (BLOBs), such as frequently used image, audio, and video files, and other files that are used to display web pages, such as .css and .js files. It is used on the web servers to reduce the network traffic to and load on the database server.

By default the Blob Cache is disabled and to enable it is necessary to modify a parameter in each web application at web.config level.

It is very simple:

 <BlobCache location="C:BlobCache15" path=".(gif|jpg|jpeg|jpe|jfif|bmp|dib|tif|tiff|themedbmp|themedcss|themedgif|themedjpg|themedpng|ico|png|wdp|hdp|css|js|asf|avi|flv|m4v|mov|mp3|mp4|mpeg|mpg|rm|rmvb|wma|wmv|ogg|ogv|oga|webm|xap)$" maxSize="10" enabled="false"> 

Only it is necessary to modify the location (as a best practise it is recommended to store blobs in a different location from the Index and the installation drive) and modify the parameter “enabled”

But what happen if I have multiple servers and multiple web applications? Do I need to enter to each one of the server to modify these properties? Not necessary, you can do it with the following Powershell from Bart’s Hideout

The only thing that you have to do is to copy the code in a ps1 file and execute it as it follows:

./nameoffile.ps1 -url http://urlwebapp -location locationblob

That’s all, you can check your servers and you will see that you have modified the web.config in all web servers, job done!

Hope it helps!

Enable Developer Dashboard

Today I will post something pretty easy to use, but for SharePoint Administrators is synonim of performance problems in our farms: The Developer Dashboard

To Enable the developer dashboard, we have to open a SharePoint Powershell Shell and type the following:

$content = ([Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebService]::ContentService)
$appsetting =$content.DeveloperDashboardSettings
$appsetting.DisplayLevel = [Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPDeveloperDashboardLevel]::On
$appsetting.Update()

We have to be aware that this module only will be visibe to people who are site collection administrator

Of course, if we want to disable the developer dashboard,type the following:

$content = ([Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebService]::ContentService)
$appsetting =$content.DeveloperDashboardSettings
$appsetting.DisplayLevel = [Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPDeveloperDashboardLevel]::Off
$appsetting.Update()

Hope it helps!