May 05, 2008
A. Implementing backup and restore
Considerations for Backing Up and Restoring WSS Data
You can use backup and restore within the SharePoint GUI to back up content databases, Central Administration, or stsadm.exe for a whole collection.
To restore a site that has become corrupt or restore a site to a previous state, use Central Administration. You don’t have to have SQL Server to do this kind of backup; but you must have administrative privileges to the local server running WSS 3.0.Individual site backups are faster, but take longer to restore.
You can use the GUI to roll back a site to restore access permissions for a site.
You must create a scheduled task that calls a script for stsadm.exe for scheduled backups. Stsadm.exe doesn’t have a scheduler.
How to Perform a Backup and Restore in a WSS Farm
Use Central Administration or the other tools mentioned previously.
B. Managing Site Performance
The Role of Site Quotas in Managing Site Performance
To compute the quota limits:
Estimated size for site quota = Total amount of disk space available for content databases/Total number of sites per site collection
How to Define a Quota Template
Quota templates can define hard or soft limits for all sites on a virtual server. When a site reaches the warning level, notifications are sent to all site users.
The Role of Locks in Managing Site Quotas
Locking means the site becomes read-only when the site quota for storage is reached. Automatically locked sites display a disk full error message. Sites locked manually by administrator display an “access denied” error message.You must check current quota values before updating them or you can risk locking a site.
How to Apply a Quota Template with Locks
You can apply a quota template to a site collection or web application. You can set quota limits for the amount of stored data and for users.You can manage locks to block adding, updating, or removing information from a site collection.You can change the lock status at any point. For example, if the site quota has been reached and the site is automatically locked, you can change the lock status to allow users to access the site.
If you set a quota on a site collection, this overrides quotas set at the Web application level.
Methods for Recovering Disk Space
Create a backup, move the sites to another server, and then remove the sites on the old server.
Manage site quotas so you can observe the rate at which sites grow to plan for future server requirements.
Use short-term solutions like limiting log file sizes on the SQL server.
C. Monitoring the Server PerformanceBest Practices for Checking the WSS 3.0 Servers
You should check usage logs and server logs to monitor your system “health.” Check the servers every weeks for:
Site collection usage data,
RAM usage,
Event logs.
Because server RAM processes your web pages, RAM has a significant impact on WSS 3.0 peformance. You must check the following for RAM usage:
Task Manager can show you the peak RAM usage that indicates server usage. This helps you make sure the server has enough memory.
Performance Monitor can show RAM usage over a time period and helps you plan memory requirements.
Important: Monitor RAM closely if the WSS box is on a virtual server to keep from using virtual memory. When virtual servers run out of RAM, they start using hard disk space. When all limits are reached, you can add more hard disk space or add a new SQL server using Central Administration. You can also span content databases across several SQL servers.
The Event Log on the server can help you figure out problems; you must turn Diagnostics Logging. View server event logs from Central Administration > Operations page. Or, use the WSS 3.0 management pack from the MOM server.
How to Monitor the Site Collection Usage Summary
You can use the Internet Explorer SharePoint interface to do this. View the usage logs weekly to analyze trends and identify sites that are not used.You can also look at detailed reports concerning storage using the Storage Space Allocation link on the Site Collection Usage Summary page. This page is available in the SharePoint Internet Explorer interface.
Methods for Monitoring Event Logs
You must monitor both usage logs and server logs. For monitoring event logs, use these two methods:WSS 3.0 Web Event Viewer - this provides information of all servers in the farm in the computer’s event log. You must specify thresholds. The Web Event Viewer shows all WSS 3.0 server events.MOM for SQL Server and IIS monitors WSS on IIS. WSS uses SQL Server for storing information and IIS for serving web pages. MOM generates reports to track all of these systems with the WSS-MOM pack. MOM is the best place to monitor the performance all three systems: SQL Server, IIS, and WSS 3.0.Important: You can also use other MOM packs to track problems with the WFE and back-end database servers.
D. Tuning and Optimizing PerformanceBest Practices for Dealing with Performance Issues on WSS Servers
For running out of disk space or performance issues, you can scale up or scale down the WSS 3.0 deployment.
Low hard disk space - allocate additional space on the volume; split content databases between disks.
Performance on single server - use the Performance Monitor to check for bottlenecks; address the issues by using additional hardware.
Performance issues are usually related to CPU, hard disk, or RAM.
To improve hard disk performance, move data to a faster disk or add more disks.
Add a faster CPU or additional processors, especially for indexing and search.
For WFE servers, add more RAM. Use the Task Manager to determine peak RAM usage or use the Performance Monitor tool to track the usage over time. For virtual servers, monitor RAM to ensure you do not use virtual memory and affect disk input/output.
If the server reaches capacity, scale out and add additional content database SQL servers.
Performance on a farm - check to see if the bottleneck is caused by the WFE or SQL server: (1) for WFEs, add more of them; (2) for SQL servers, add more RAM, hard disk space, or a higher performance SQL server.
The Role of Performance Monitor in Measuring Server Throughput
To create a trace log:
On the Taskbar, click Start, and then click Run. Enter perfmon and press ENTER.
In Performance, point to the counter pane and, on the shortcut menu, select Add Counter.
Select Use local computer counter to monitor local computers. Select Select counter from computer to monitor a remote computer and enter the UNC path for the remote computer.
On the Performance object list, click several performance objects.
Select the counter for each object.
Click Add.
Counters for WSS servers
Processor - Percent processor time/total
Network interface - Bytes total per second/network interface
Logical disk - Percent idle time: C:, D:, and so forth
Paging file - Percentage usage
Memory - available MBs; page faults per second
System - processor queue length
ASP .Net applications - requests per second/total
SharePoint-specific counters
ASP .Net applications - requests per second/total
Web service - requests per second/total, individual portal, or IIS virtual root
Search - query rate or succeeded queries
Search catalogs - number of documents
Search catalogs - Queries rate
Solutions for Troubleshooting Performance Issues on WFE Servers
Continuous high CPU usage on WFE -
When WFE usage is greater than 80%, the worker process hangs, waiting for a back-end server response. You can stop and start the WSS 3.0 application in IIS witihout affecting other applications on the server. Thus, you can recycle the worker process in WSS.
Sustained nonzero value for the System\Processor Queue Length counter shows that processes are waiting to run or the worker process needs to be recycled. To identify the problem process, monitor the Processor Time counter with the Windows Performance Console.
High disk space usage on WFE server -
Web parts may not render if the OS disk volume is too small for a large Windows Server 2003 running ASP.Net and WSS. Disk space can drop below 10 percent on the WFE servers. Running WSS and ASP.Net strains the system; to fix the problem, scale up the WFE servers with 4 GB memory, with a page file of at least 6 GB.
In addition, you may need additional GB of disk space for the ASP.NET Web server cache on a large server. You might need to move the page volume to a second disk volume. This is because the disk space requirement for the OS files on a Windows Server 2003 server, running ASP.NET and WSS, is larger than the usual OS partition size of 5 to 10 GB.
WFE servers should be configured with larger OS partitions like as 18 GB of mirrored disk space.
Slow WFE server performance -
WSS 3.0 uses memory to cache Web pages, slowing the performance of the WFE servers. To address this, you can increase the amount of physical memory and available address space on WFE servers. WFE servers must have 4 GB of physical memory and you should use the /3GB switch to increase the address range of the servers.
Store the paging file on a different disk than the OS. In addition, the boot.ini hidden file launches the OS, usually on C: drive.
High usage sites to be configured on WFE server -
You should configure each virtual server with its own application pool. However, if you have many high-usage sites on a WFE server, you might not be able to configure each virtual server with its own application pool. With IIS 6.0, you can configure a Web garden application pool, an application pool with more than one worker process on a single server.
Improve performance by lowering the number of web applications on the WFE. This reduces the IIS metabase size, amount of server CPU, and memory usage. You must configure maximum limits for: (1) number of worker processes per server, (2) the amount of worker process virtual memory, (3) the number of application pools per server, (4) the maximum number of virtual servers per server, and (5) the number of virtual servers per application pool.
Best Practices to Troubleshoot Performance Issues on Database Servers
Use Moderate-Sized Content Databases – Set a target size for content databases to manage backup processes for large site numbers in multiple server farms. You can also limit the maximum size of the individual SharePoint site by setting the storage limit of an individual site to the recommended 2 GB or less.
Database Storage – Set up storage area network (SAN) environments for use by SQL Server clusters. This saves on costs for storage and hardware maintenance.
Deploy Additional Content Databases – lower the limit for the database capacity reached value to a value less than the number of sites in the databse. Do this if the size of a content database gets close to the target database size. Reducing the value forces the creation of new sites in a different databse that has not reached the value of the database capacity reached limit.
Monitor Disk Space Usage- enable the SQL Server database to use another disk volume if the free space on a back-end database drops below 10% to prevent file uploads from failing. This is a short-term solution. For the long tem, you should move the database to a new volume.
Use File Servers, Windows Distributed File System (DFS), and SAN -
To store documents that you don’t want to collaborate on, you should use file servers and DFS.
For large document collections, you can use SAN. WSS 3.0 can still index the files. This is necessary for files larger than the default limit in WSS 3.0, which is 50 MB.
You should use file servers to store: Large audio and video media files·
Other files greater than 100 MB in size, such as disk imaging files·
Microsoft IT-managed software product distribution files·
Microsoft Access® database (.mdb) files and Outlook® personal files (.pst)·
Scripts and executable files
Ensure Available Memory is Greater Than 50 MB - for back-end database and WFE servers. Otherwise, you will get failures when uploading large files to a library. If you increase the Maximum Upload Size from its default value of 50 MB, you must also increase the acceptable amount of available memory.
Troubleshooting Common Errors Encountered After WSS Deployment
“Cannot connect to the configuration database” - Password associated with the SQL server system account used to connect to the SQL databases has expired or changed. You should change the password associated with the sQL server system and reset it in SQL server.
Usage analysis must be configured manually for each new web application.
Set usage analysis with the stsadmin tool with setproperty operation.
If you have assigned an IP address in IIS, you must change to “All Unassigned” before you use WSS 3.0. Assigned IP addresses are not supported.
If you see poor user request processing after adding more memory to WFE servers from 2 GB to 4 GB, you should add the /3GB switch to the WFE server boot.ini files.
