This section describes the performance impact of some common portal site operations.

Authentication

Performance tests of SharePoint Portal Server 2003 authentication mechanisms indicate similar performance for Anonymous authentication and Integrated Windows authentication. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) usage causes approximately a 10 percent performance impact on the portal site common operations throughput. Using Basic authentication gives a 10 percent performance boost. However, to help ensure security, use either SSL or Integrated Windows authentication as the authentication mechanism.

Customizations

SharePoint Portal Server 2003 design and engineering ensures optimal use of Web server and SQL Server resources. The architecture is flexible and allows for different customization approaches.

Custom Web Parts

You can easily extend the functionality of SharePoint Portal Server 2003 by creating custom Web Parts. When you create custom Web Parts, test them carefully to ensure that they make efficient use of both Web server and SQL Server resources, and that they do not have a negative impact on the SharePoint Portal Server 2003 deployment. Web Parts that are not well designed or well written can reduce the throughput capacity of a portal site deployment significantly.

If, for example, a portal site serves 24 pages per second, each page is served in approximately 40 milliseconds. Therefore, all Web Parts on that page must be rendered in that time.

You can test Web Parts by using code profiling, database profiling, or load simulation. For more information about code profiling Web applications with Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, see the Microsoft Press book Performance Testing Microsoft .NET Web Applications and Optimizing Database Performance Overview on the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) For more information about profiling database applications, see the Microsoft Press book Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Performance Tuning Technical Reference and ASP.NET Optimization on MSDN. Microsoft Press books and MSDN also provide information about load simulation.

Recommendation

Test all custom Web Parts carefully by using code profiling, database profiling, and load simulation before deploying to production servers.

Event Handlers

Developers can build solutions that use the event mechanisms provided by SharePoint Portal Server document libraries. Performance of event handlers can significantly affect portal site throughput. Test your event handlers carefully to ensure that they make efficient use of resources and do not have a negative impact on the SharePoint Portal Server 2003 deployment.

Modified Pages

SharePoint Portal Server 2003 stores some of its basic page and template information in the file system on the front-end Web server. These pages, which have not been customized, and metadata are called "ghosted pages."

When a page is modified, it is written to the database and read from there. The performance impact of reading these pages from the database rather than from the disk is approximately 10 percent.

Search

Search performance depends on the number of documents and properties in the indexes, the number of content indexes, and the complexity of the search query. Search performance also depends on the index throughput, because search requires an up-to-date index.

The total number of queries performed when searching is equal to the number of searches multiplied by the number of content indexes. Each search issued will query each content source or index once.

The expected search throughput on a medium farm with 5 million documents is approximately 20 queries per second.

Security

There is no noticeable performance impact on throughput when accessing the portal site with different access rights. Generally, the less access a user has to a SharePoint Portal Server 2003 portal site, the fewer server resources are needed.

Windows Security Groups for Large Sites

Because distribution groups that are used to set up the initial membership for team sites are expanded and reflect only the initial distribution group membership, security groups are useful for maintaining membership for larger sites.

Distribution groups work well for smaller sites or sites that have a life span during which membership is unlikely to change. Security groups are not expanded and, therefore, permissions will reflect recent changes made in Active Directory.

 Note   Only security groups or individuals can be listed as members on portal sites.