Van Laan on Sharepoint and all things Microsoft

ASP.NET Memory and CPU Considerations as they relate to SharePoint

This post is a potential placeholder for ongoing research into whether or not ASP.NET app pool and machine.config settings changes from the default are necessary for a stable SharePoint installation.

I haven't put them into place yet, but have seen a few installations where they might be necessary.

Here are the governing documents from Microsoft. No connecting mention to SharePoint at all, but it's certainly running on .NET 2.0 technology, so why not, right?

Contention, poor performance, and deadlocks when you make Web service requests from ASP.NET applications:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/821268

MSDN Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability

Chapter 6 — Improving ASP.NET Performance

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms998549.aspx

This aricle might be useful, as well:

828222 How to generate a dump file when ASP.NET deadlocks in IIS 6.0
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=828222

This questions are based off of seeing these events in the event log occasionally:

Event Type: Warning
Event Source: W3SVC
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1013
Date:  6/12/2008
Time:  12:46:05 PM
User:  N/A
Computer: HostNameHere
Description:
A process serving application pool 'SharePoint - AppPool Name' exceeded time limits during shut down. The process id was '####'.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

I like this bit of help from Matt:

http://www.dvsug.org/Matt/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=3

He's suggesting a memory threshold to recycle at between 800MB to 1.5 GB.

And he led me to this great article:

http://blogs.technet.com/stefan_gossner/archive/2007/11/26/dealing-with-memory-pressure-problems-in-moss-wss.aspx

Talking about memory and CPU issues with SharePoint. Very good read.

And finally found Joel O's post on the topic:

http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2007/10/29/sharepoint-app-pool-settings.aspx

And here's a great free utility for managing Application pools:

http://www.harbar.net/articles/APM.aspx

Sharepoint Skinner - Great Tool!

Found and tried a great new tool today--Sharepoint Skinner from

http://www.elumenotion.com

It's not a replacement for Sharepoint Designer by any means, but it does a great job grouping style areas and has proved a great tool for understanding which styles do what. Below is an example of changing the background color using Skinner.

First, download from:

http://www.elumenotion.com/Downloads/SkinnerSetup.zip

or

Download SkinnerSetup.zip

And, here's a link to elumenotion's walkthrough:

http://www.elumenotion.com/Blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=4

And here's a short walkthrough on changing the background color on a site, which defaults to white on almost all (maybe all?) of the out of the box site themes.

First, install the program on your local machine, then startup Sharepoint Skinner:

Then, type in the URL of the site you'd like to modify. I'm going to select a site collection that's hanging off of my /sites managed path on my main portal site.

At this point, I'm looking at the styles associated with the color palette associated with the

/_layouts/1033/styles/controls.css?rev=EhwiQKSLiI%2F4dGDs6DyUdQ%3D%3D

portion of this template.

I want to check out the colors that were changed when the Plastic site theme was created, Plastic being the out of the box site theme on which this site is based.

So, hit the drop-down box at the top, and select:

/sites/Legal/_themes/Plastic/Plas1011-65001.css?rev=12%2E0%2E0%2E4518

from the few choices available.

You'll see there are many more color options on the right hand side now:

There are two colors in each row, one representing the original color of the theme, the other the current color. they'll all match at first as we've not made any changes. And making changes won't hurt anything--you're working on this theme on your local machine and it won't apply to the server until we've saved it and uploaded it to the server.

The numbers to the right of these are where things get really interesting. What the fine people at elumenotion have done is to group related series of styles together so they can be changed in bulk. Thank you, thank you.

Scroll down to the bottom of the colors and, second from the bottom is a set with 85 colors in it!

Among the many styles in here is the one we're looking for for the background.

Let's change the entire style group and see what happens. We'll pick a nice dark blue so it's pretty visible. We'll click on the right-side color box and click Choose to select a new color:

Then, click save to apply the color change to all 85 styles:

That's a bit too much, as only part of the top bar gets done. When I get a bit more time I'll hopefully figure out which other color button will skin the whole business, if that's possible. Though what really gets hairy with the Sharepoint Design is that the color gradients are often composed of many different pictures.

Anyways, we'll revert back by clicking the color button on the left side and selecting yes to the prompt:

Now, we're back to the original look:

This, time, we'll click the color one from the very bottom with 85 styles again, same as above.

But, instead of selecting the Choose button, we'll scroll down the list of 85 styles until we see

.ms-bodyareaframe

Click on this link and we'll get a text box that we can edit:

There you can see BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff . #ffffff being the web designer's shorthand for the color white. We want to change this to another color and, because we're lazy, we'll just look over on the right side to see the code for the other colors and pick one we like. How about a light blue? Which is #84e2f4 . So, we'll just replace the #ffffff right in this box:

And this is what our page looks like:

We've just modified the background and nothing else. We rule.

So, this is a great tool for determining what the particular style groups do.

To actually apply this theme to the server, follow the steps in the elumenotion walkthrough, which are basically:

"Select Export Theme from the File Menu. Give your theme a name that will be used on the SharePoint server, pick a directory, and viola! You have a theme. Now all you have to do is install it.

To add the theme to a site, copy the created directory to:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\THEMES\
Open:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\1033\SPTHEMES.XML

Copy the bottom section and modify it as appropriate (it's very simple).

Recycle your app pool and bada-bing! Go to your site settings and apply the theme. "

Thank you again, elumenotion. And thanks to Juan in Jax.

MVPS.ORG Hosts file to block bad pages, ads, spyware, etc.

So, this isn't really a Sharepoint post, but it's something I use continually, both on my own machines and whenever I get called to help out friends and family. How many times have I heard: "My computer is slow. Should I get a new one?" Nine times out of ten it's because of spyware and random .exe's clogging up the memory space of a machine, or numerous Internet Explorer toolbars or popups slowing down web browsing.

The good people at www.mvps.org have provided what is basically a blacklist of known malware and adware web sites that represent the seedier neighborhoods of the internet. The short instructions are to download their list from http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt or http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.zip and copy and paste it into your own hosts file located on your computer at C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts or C:\WINNT\system32\drivers\etc\hosts (depends on which operating system you're running).

Basically, go to http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm to read all the explanation needed, then click the link about halfway down the page to view the hosts file:

Then, in an explorer window, browse to  C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\ or C:\WINNT\system32\drivers\etc\ depending on your OS. Windows XP and Windows Vista will be the former directory. Double-click the file called hosts to open it. You'll get a prompt asking what program you want to use to open the file, as it has no extension. Don't ask me why Microsoft decided not to give it an extension. Choose notepad to open the file:

Go back to the Internet Explorer window where you've got the hosts file displayed and click Edit, Select All then Edit, Copy to copy the entire contents into your cache (or hit ctrl-a and then ctrl-c). Then go back to the notepad window with your hosts file open and click Edit, Select All and Edit, Paste (or hit ctrl-a and then ctrl-v to Paste). This will copy the contents of the mvps.org hosts file into your local hosts file, which should look like this:

Then, click File, Save to save the file and you've added the entries to your local machine! What this does is redirect requests that originate from your computer to malicious spyware, adware, and malware sites to the local machine's address, 127.0.0.1 . It will actually make browsing faster as your computer will no longer go to retrieve all those crap ads and bad software it was trying to get to. You might get "Page cannot be found" in various places on your browser window when browsing the web, but the experience will be worth it. Here are some examples:

So, as you can see, it doesn't really disrupt the browsing experience. It just doesn't allow certain ads to be displayed in zones on the web page. To me, that's just a huge bonus in browsing the web. Most pages are cluttered with crap ads and popups that really interfere with the browsing experience. I've never really had a website completely not work for me by applying this method. And, after a very short time browsing, I don't even notice the Page not found pieces anymore. When I do, it's usually with a brief sense of enjoyment that I've avoided any more mind pollution.

Thanks to MVPS.org and, of course, Thurley.

Enjoy.

mstsc /console

mstsc /v:<server> /console

Click, Start, Run, then mstsc /console to hit the current console session.

This will allow you to basically have a third TS session into a server, as this will work even with two connected sessions.

You can also use

mstsc /v:<server> /console

like this:

which will pop you right to the login screen for the server.

This definitely works on Windows Server 2003, working on confirming it's functionality on Server 2000.

Microsoft reference:

http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/library/0866b48e-aa78-40b2-b150-47fc679300d91033.mspx?mfr=true

Using the SMS 2003 Toolkit Trace Log Viewer to dynamically watch Sharepoint Server 2007 or SQL Server logs as they’re written

Using the SMS 2003 Toolkit Trace Log Viewer to dynamically watch Sharepoint Server 2007 logs as they’re written

First, go to

Systems Management Server 2003 Toolkit 2

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sms/bb676787.aspx

And download and install the toolkit.

Then you’ll have an option available to run:

Pull it up and browse to your Log file location Path, which you can find by going to Central Administration, Opreations, and select Diagnostic Logging:

I’ve placed them on the D: drive, like this:

But the default value is:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\LOGS

Once you’ve browsed there one time, the program will save that location for ease of getting back there.

Anyways, pull it up and you can dynamically watch the Sharepoint Server 2007 Trace Logs get populated on the fly. Red highlights mean errors, yellow means warnings.

Here’s an error:

And you can get the full detail of the line at the bottom. Very useful for troubleshooting specific issues or demonstrating that they can be recreated.

It’s also quite useful for watching your SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005 Logs, too.

If you click the last line at the bottom and highlight it, the program will continue to keep the last line highlighted, moving events up the screen as they come in, effectively giving you a real-time log viewer.