Measuring SharePoint Page Rendering

Common causes of poor performance in SharePoint are combination of large lists with an inefficient view or custom solution. As a SharePoint administrator it could be a challenge to monitor all pages in your site. In this article I will show you how to identify slow loading pages and views.

One of the keys for performance testing in SharePoint is determining how long your page takes to load for the average user. There are lots of tools out there to measure page rendering time, but when we using SharePoint framework, we want to give our site administration the ability to monitor in the browser and to indentify the slow pages in the site.

First, let’s build our ping method to calculate the page render time and the content size.
The following procedure describes the steps used to request a SharePoint page from a server, for example, a List View or Homepage.

1. Create a WebRequest instance by calling Create with the URI of the resource.
WebRequest webRequest = WebRequest.Create(url);

2. Enable authentication, Use the user deafalt credentials.
webRequest.UseDefaultCredentials = true;

3. start measuring page rendering time.
DateTime startTime = DateTime.Now;

4. Send the request to the server, call GetResponse.
WebResponse webResponse = webRequest.GetResponse();

5. Page rendering time finished - Stop measuring page rendering time.
DateTime stopTime = DateTime.Now;

6. Calculate the total render time.
TimeSpan duration = stopTime - startTime;

7. Retrieve the number of bytes returned.
long responseContentLength = webResponse.ContentLength

Here is what the ping method looks like:

private void PingUrl(string url)
{
try
{
WebRequest webRequest = WebRequest.Create(url);
webRequest.UseDefaultCredentials = true;
DateTime startTime = DateTime.Now;
WebResponse webResponse = webRequest.GetResponse();
DateTime stopTime = DateTime.Now;
string status = (((HttpWebResponse)webResponse).StatusDescription);
TimeSpan duration = stopTime - startTime;
long responseContentLength = webResponse.ContentLength;
webResponse.Close();
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
//handel error
}
}

To be able to scans all site pages, like: lists views navigation items in the site and aspx pages in your site, we will need to find them first.

Get all Lists and Views in your site

To gets all lists and views that are contained in the our site, we can use these two collections:

• SPListCollection
• SPViewCollection

Syntax :

SPWeb web = SPContext.Current.Web;
SPListCollection webLists = web.Lists;
foreach (SPList list in webLists)
{

SPViewCollection listViews = list.Views;
foreach (SPView view in listViews)
{
//call ping method
}
}


Get site Homapage

We can simply use the SPWeb.Url property to retrieve the default home page.

Syntax:

SPWeb web = SPContext.Current.Web;
string url = web.Url;
//call ping method

Get all publishing pages

The PublishingWeb class provides publishing specific behavior for a site that supports publishing, including access to pages lists.

Syntax:

if (PublishingWeb.IsPublishingWeb(web))
{
Guid pagesListId = PublishingWeb.GetPagesListId(web);
SPList pagesList = web.Lists[pagesListId];
SPListItemCollection pagesListItems = pagesList.Items;
foreach (SPListItem pageItem in pagesListItems)
{

if (PublishingPage.IsPublishingPage(pageItem))
{
//call pin method
}
}
}

Get all site navigation links

In SharePoint we have two main navigations, the Global Navigation and the Quick Launch. For both we can use the SPNavigationNodeCollection to retrieve all navigation links.

Syntax:

SPNavigationNodeCollection globalNodes = web.Navigation.GlobalNodes;
foreach (SPNavigationNode node in globalNodes)
{
//call ping method
}
SPNavigationNodeCollection quickLaunchNodes = web.Navigation.QuickLaunch;
foreach (SPNavigationNode node in quickLaunchNodes)
{
//call ping method
}

To add a link on the Site Administration section in the Site Settings page, we can use this element manifests:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
<CustomAction
Id="UserInterfaceCustomActions.SiteSettings"
GroupId="SiteAdministration"
Location="Microsoft.SharePoint.SiteSettings"
Sequence="306"
Title="URL Ping Tool">
<UrlAction Url="_LAYOUTS/UrlPingTool.aspx"/>
</CustomAction>
</Elements>

Create the Application Page

After adding the link we need to create the actually application page (ASPX), in my previous article I describe how to do this. SharePoint Application Page with Custom Controls

To deploy the application page on all SharePoint sites, we can create a Farm feature that installs this page on the site settings:

<Feature Id="{GUID}"
Title="Url Ping Tool"
Description="The Url Ping Tool is a farm feature in SharePoint that provide additional performance and tracing information that can be used to troubleshoot issues with page rendering time. "
Version="12.0.0.0"
Hidden="FALSE"
Scope="Farm"
DefaultResourceFile="core"
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
<ElementManifests>
<!-- reference to the element manifests -->
<ElementManifest Location="elements.xml"/> </ElementManifests>
</Feature>

Large lists, custom web parts or any custom solution can have performance impact on your site. In order to capture page load information, we develop a custom tool to troubleshoot rendering performance issues.

The complete solution (WSP) can be downloaded on CodePlex: http://upt.codeplex.com/
You can also browse the source code here