Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
After my recent delve into memory optimisation for non-work code, I spent some time recently investigating a memory issue in a production Sitecore site. The outcome of that was an issue which can be a common problem for .Net code. So in the hope of seeing it less in the future, here are some notes on what I saw and how you can avoid the same trap...
I bumped into an interesting redirect-loop issue with a Sitecore instance sitting behind Azure Front Door recently. It's not a product I know a great deal about, so this seemed worth writing down in case I come across it again, or others bump into the same challenge. Turns out it wasn't a Sitecore-specific issue, but its definitely something which could affect other Sitecore sites...
Some time back I did a load of work on performance diagnostic work on some poorly performing Sitecore websites. (Which was the basis of a talk I gave a few times) I've recently had to look at some similar issues - but the world has moved on. I now have Visual Studio 2022 as my diagnostic tool of choice, and the websites are commonly hosted in Azure PaaS web apps. So what do you have to do these days to diagnose likely places for your code to be stuck?
Some of the most frustrating issues in IT happen when a thing which was working fine stops, and you're sure you didn't change anything. Now that very few people host their own infrastructure, these issues can be compounded because change or problems might happen in the internals of a complex infrastructure system you have no control over. I got bitten by this recently, and while I have no answers I suspect this is worth writing up just because it may help other people to realise the problem you have is not always your fault...
I've been working on a deployment of Sitecore using containers recently, and hit a scenario which isn't discussed much in the Microsoft documentation: How do you go about setting it all up if you can't use Active Directory accounts across your DevOps and Azure instances? Having done some digging, here's what I've learned so far:
With the release of Sitecore 8.2 Update 1 last week, we finally have support for running our Sitecore solutions as Azure Web App Services without the need for the Sitecore Azure Module. As someone who had never tried a PaaS deployment with the old module, this brings a load of interesting benefits, but also has a few challenges to get your head around. I've spent a bit of time experimenting, and discovered a few things that you might want to read up on before you dive in.
