Stump the Panel: SharePoint Q&A

I have one site collection where some of the calendars started loading very slowly (minutes rather than seconds). Does this on the first load for each user, but not on subsequent loads in the same general time frame. There are other users who appear to be unaffected. Does anyone have a clue what might cause this? I've run out of things to check. Environment is WSS 3.0 SP 1 and users have IE 7.

My experience has been that any SharePoint site/page will load slowly on first load, then cache and load faster afterwards. Are you certain that other calendars are loading faster on first load? Do those calendars have workflows or any custom actions, components etc. associated with them? Do the calendars have a significant number of events?

This is not a problem with the compile that occurs when content is first accessed. I even had a script set up to "warm up" a couple of these calendar pages. The curiousity is that there are still some users who do not experience the delay on the same calendars and I have not been able to determine what is different between those who do and those who do not experience the delay. I also made sure that all the reoccuring appointments had end dates and that there wasn't anywhere near the recommended limit on the number of items. One of the calendars on which this is happening is "vanilla" SharePoint - no scripts, no workflows, no calculated columns, nothing out of the ordinary. Looking for suggestions regarding what else I could look at. Thanks.

I'd try looking at the page load with Firebug and see if there's anything obvious that's hanging up the page load in the console. It could be something that has nothing to do with the calendar, like script in the master page, for instance.

M.

JoyceMR wrote :
> I have one site collection where some of the calendars started loading very
> slowly (minutes rather than seconds). Does this on the first load for each
> user, but not on subsequent loads in the same general time frame. There
> are other users who appear to be unaffected. Does anyone have a clue what
> might cause this? I've run out of things to check. Environment is WSS
> 3.0 SP 1 and users have IE 7.

One question, are these calendars being surfaced on a web part page at the top level of the site, or is this happening when going into an events list?

If it is the former, check for closed web parts. It may also explain why some users are not experiencing the problem because they may have customized their personal view and are not plagued with closed web parts on the page.

Chris has a nice suggestion, not just for calendar pages, but all pages that were developed before the site admin understood how to deal with web parts. Here's a little trick for you.

Go to the entrance page of your site.
In the url, put "?contents=1" after the URL string, or if there is already a parameter set, put "&contents=1"
Hit Enter on your keyboard

All web parts associated with the page will be shown and you'll be able to remove all of the closed ones. I've actually seen a site that had 77 closed web parts on it.

Let's have a contest. Who has the most closed web parts and didn't know it?

One other option you may want to check is how many entries are there in the calendar, I have found that the performance of the Calendar and also Gantt View becomes increasingly slower and slower as more entries are made.

One thing I did was to save the page as HTML and see what size the page ended up and my Gantt View was 726kb in size. After using some filtering to remove some unneeded content I have managed to get it back to a more reasonable level.

I am wondering if it's just taking time to transfer the page and render the content, out of intrest how many items are in the Calendar list?

An additional thing to check (as a part of using Firebug for load times) is your Master Page/css theming. If there is custom branding on the site then it is possible that some line of master page goodness can cause a slowdown on the page for users (possibly even a large library included?).

To keep my sanity (or try) I have picked just one of these calendars as a focus and found the following in response to everyone's suggestions:
The only customization is the addition of a single 3 item choice field which is not currently used for any view filtering.
There are 561 items in the list
The delay only occurs for the calendar view which is rendering on the standard calendar.aspx page. (current events and all events display in a normal amount of time)
There are no closed webparts on the page (but thanks for the trick to go to the maintenance page quickly)
Saved as full html the htm page is 141kb and the associated files folder is 754kb (it only contains Microsoft generated items - nothing extra or customized).
I have been told that sometimes if they cancel (red x) the rendering and then refresh it will display quicker.
There are plans to migrate to a new server at which point I'll do the WSS 3.0 SP 2 install. Still befuddled by why things would have been working fine for months and then start encountering these problems with no known associated changes. Thanks.

Just a thought, do you know if the server is using SQL Server or SQL Express?