Kentico CMS 5.0 Performance report

Hi there,

We finally finished an official version of the performance report for Kentico CMS 5.0 that summarizes the most important information about the Kentico CMS Performance.

Do not expect anything in size of a book, we wanted to be brief and directly hit the main points, since many of additional aspects depend on the specific web sites, so it wouldn't be as general then.

You can download the report here: KenticoCMS_5-0_Performance.pdf (7.8 MB) 

In addition to the comments in the report, here are my personal ones and the recommendations:

• As you can see, the full page caching (output caching) is the best what you can do if your content tends to be static, use it everywhere you can.
• Kentico CMS does not use standard ASP.NET output caching by default as some other CMSes. We use our own solution since version 4.1 which if far more efficient (12k RPS instead of about 7k what would be with the standard one), that is why the performance of Kentico comes very close to a static page.
• Caching (any) always brings improvements and if you use it, you can have only single DB server for entire web farm, because the SQL does not need to serve too much data.
• It is always better to store files in the file system and cache them.
• No matter what web site you build and with which CMS, if the web site will be heavily loaded, you need to take care about your database indexes and statistics, there is no way how to get this out of the box from any product. What we give you is the default configuration which is a good fit for typical web sites, but once you add your custom structure or scale the project up, you always need to review it.

What you can expect in future from performance and scalability perspective (I will be definitely commenting this out in my next blog posts, so be patient)

• 5.5 has optimized Indexes and Views so it produces close to half CPU load to the database than 5.0, so you will be able to serve more web farm servers from a single DB server. This also results in about 20-30% performance increase based on particular situation.
• 5.5 comes with even better cache management and introduces new ways how to reduce contention, so even if the cache is empty and the web site process starts under very heavy load, it handles it very well
• With 5.5, there will be possible to add custom output cache dependencies, so you will be able to use it even on content that needs to be updated right away when changed.
• 5.5 will be released at the beginning of the next week, so look forward to it!

And that is pretty much all for now.

See you next time ...