Sitecore 5.3.1 performing badly for you (too)?

Yea, I know it's been a while :P Been extremely busy on lots of projects of a non-Sitecore nature, so haven't really been getting new material to write about. Until today that is. Ok so, 2 colleagues were pretty much getting ready to tear an entire solution apart, looking for the source of a massive performance issue inside the Sitecore client. We're talking like 30 seconds+, for clicking any item in the Content Editor - fun stuff, I tell ya. Ok, so the SQL databases were not set to "Simple Recovery" - this on it's own caused a growth in the log-files to the neighbourhood of 3 gigabytes. And here comes me, thinking I'll save the day before lives are lost - and quickly switch it to "Simple" and sort out the performance issue. You know - two birds with one stone, kinda thing. But no. Instead I found myself getting caught up in endless log prowling activity, minuteously replacing single files one by one, to try and track down this problem. Eventually I turn to a colleague of mine, who has worked pretty much non-stop on Sitecore projects for the past 2 years - to see if he has a helping hand for me. Indeed. He turned me to a solution he had opened in the Sitecore support site, back in May 2007.

Change source to GUID on these /sitecore/templates/system/Templates/Sections/Appearance/Appearance/__Subitems Sorting – Source: {B01EB085-82BC-4D79-B15F-90EAB9E98062} /sitecore/templates/system/Templates/Sections/Publishing/ Publishing /__Publishing groups – Source: {D9E44555-02A6-407A-B4FC-96B9026CAADD} This should resolve your performance issue.

And sure enough. Without really having a clue why, this actually solved any and all issues we had with performance on the solution - just like that. Go figure. The support issue is closed with the words; "It is already fixed in Sitecore 5.3.1 and it is related just to Sitecore 5.3.1.". Who knows....

Item Name Length oddities

Was running some custom code that created lots and lots of items in the Master Database. Now nevermind the reasoning for now, but the code needs to create items in a "flat" structure (as opposed to a folder-based hierarchical one) and some of those names can turn out to be fairly long. Wasn't long before I encountered this one:

An item name can not be more than 100 characters in length at Sitecore.Data.Items.ItemUtil.AssertItemName(String name) at Sitecore.Data.DataManager.AssertItemName(String itemName) at Sitecore.Data.DataManager.AddFromMaster(String itemName, ID itemID, ID masterID, Item parent) at Sitecore.Data.Items.Item.Add(String name, MasterID masterID)

Now, ok... I can understand the fact that there HAS to be some sort of limit imposed on Item Name length. What eludes me though, is the "100 character" limit, when the database looks like this: I looked around, and this length isn't configurable anywhere I can locate (in Sitecore 5.1.x atleast).

5.1.1.12 released

Well bit late on this news, but had a few busy weeks. Changed employer, I now work at Codehouse and this is probably going to get me heavily involved in various Sitecore projects. Hopefully this also means, my activity level will go up a bit on this blog ;-) Anyhow, 5.1.1.12 provides a few minor changes:

• Fixed: Events for DataList controls (such as DataGrid, Repeater, etc.) do not work with Sitecore. Didn't encounter this one myself.
• Fixed: Performance Counters throw access denied errors on Windows 2000 Server and Windows 2003(IIS 5 /Isolated mode) when someone tries to access the back-end. Mentioned this one, after spending a couple of hours trying to figure out what was going on. Excellent that this is now fixed ;-)

Other than that, it looks to be a minor bugfix release with no other major changes.

Access is denied - Version 5.1.1.11

System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception: Access is denied exception in Sitecore 5.1.1.11 Right, it's about 3 hours past the time where I would have normally headed home. I was, however, stuck with trying to figure out why my fully working Sitecore 5.1.1.11 installation suddenly started failing with the above message after being deployed from my development environment to my operations environment. No fun, I tell ya :-P So here's the deal. Apparently 5.1.1.11 implements some (new, or for the first time - I don't know) Performance Counters. This is all good and well - I would have appreciated it a bit more though, if they in their update notes would have told me what might be needed to be done to avoid the above error. As it turns out, your ASPNET account needs access to a specific registry key for this error to go away. Specifically: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Perflib. So (and many probably don't know this) fire up REGEDT32.exe (Start->Run), navigate to the key, select "Permissions" from the menu - and grant the ASPNET account full control to the key. Voila - problem solved. Thank you very much Bruce Johnson for your blogpost about the subject (not Sitecore related, the problem is of a more general nature). *shakes fist in the general direction of Sitecore HQ*... dudes... might wanna mention something like this, no? :-P