How to make a fast flying DNN site

Speed of DNN site has always been an issue however you can minimize the delays till some extent and this is true that a DNN site can run as fast as any other site built with PHP.

There are two major factors:

Dead sites
Yes, your site dies or sleeps if its not opened by a user for a certain time(in minutes of most of the servers). The IIS shuts down the process and cleans the memory in that case resulting a very long time on next first hit.

Rendering Time
The loading time of a page depends on the rendering time, design level things like CSS, image optimization, Cache settings, compression settings etc. Also, disabling the features that you don't need in a site will reduce the burden.

1. Skin should be fully CSS based

2. Use some other menu provider (Native navigations i.e; Nav, Solpart etc are slower)

3. It also depends what modules you're using in your site. Text/HTML is the fastest module.

4. For every new dnn project, we always optimize it according to Mitchel's most useful post in his blog: http://www.mitchelsellers.com/blogs/articletype/articleview/articleid/283/how-i-get-my-dotnetnuke-sites-to-run-so-fast.aspx

5. Also, there's a very good document about this topic found here DotNetNuke Performance Configuration Best Practices by Mitchel Sellers

6. Never let your application sleep.

I hope this helps!

Keep a DNN website alive for FREE

After a long time, I found something really great and free of cost and more than that it's one of the most demanded service/hack/whatever by the community. Mandeep's http://www.dnnmonitor.com now offers free ping service to keep your DNN website alive and in memory. It requires you to register only a free account and then let you add your websites and does the rest of good work itself. The website allows only the DNN websites currently. The best thing I guess is to give the url of your keepalive.aspx file. I've not yet seen the reports/graphs that they provide based on the hits to your website.

I remember the times when we used to use the desktop utilities like Renegade Mind's keep alive utility for DNN but the major drawback of it was, if the computer where its installed shuts down or goes out of internet connectivity then your site is gone again :S

I hope the service will remain free forever :p