Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
Every so often I run up against an issue that's right there in the docs, but somehow has passed me by. This week that issue was Sitecore's new V9 forms implementation, and it's relationship with languages...
Recently I wrote about an issue I encountered where a client's website was missing its GeoIP data (and the related back-end analytics data) entirely. While the changes discussed in that post solved the problem of there being no MongoDB data for GeoIP lookups at all, I continued to see odd issues with many users not being located after those fixes were made. Sorting this out seems to suggest that some of the "common wisdom" about configuring GeoIP for analytics isn't right – so here are my latest findings:
Recently a colleague of mine told me about a suggestion they'd been given about setting up an instance of Sitecore. They were told that you should put your license file into a subfolder of your data directory because the license check enumerates files and folders in the directory containing the file. So if the folder contained other things, this would slow down the check. This sounded odd to me as you have to specify the exact path of the license in your config, so I thought I'd do some investigating, and see if I could prove or disprove the suggestion.
So, putting on my best beret at a jaunty "for science!" angle, here's what I discovered:
I spent some time this week looking at a client site whose analytics data was missing GeoIP information. Since they had a valid license for Sitecore's GeoIP lookup service, this was a bit confusing. So, continuing my battle to write up all the unexpected scenarios...
I read a blog post earlier this week that talked about the benefits of compiling your View files to increase performance in Sitecore applications. Reading that post (which
I stupidly failed to keep track of the link to, so can't reference it now
the comments pointed me back to) reminded me of an interesting issue that came up on a project I was looking at recently. If you're interested in the raw performance of your Sitecore sites, you might want to consider this as well when you're planning your views:
A few weeks back I wrote about spotting site performance challenges in the patterns you might see in trace data. But over the years I've noticed another set of repeating patterns that can be relevant here: Those of how a development team can find itself thinking and acting in the run up to a project hitting problems.
If any of these resonate with you and your team, maybe it's time to take a step back and think about how you can improve things?
Sitecore's config patch files are great. But sadly it's entirely possible to cause yourself headaches with them. I've written before about how it's possible that small typos can cause big issues. In that style, a colleage brought an issue to me recently which was an interesting new variation on this fun...
I find myself doing quite a lot of work on performance for Sitecore websites at the moment. Whenever I do a similar job for a group of clients, I start to spot patterns in the sites I'm working on – and it struck me that there are some common performance issues that can be spotted just from the overview graphs you see when you collect trace data.
So to try and help you all improve the sites you ship, here are three that I've come across in a few projects recently:
It's a pretty common requirement that deploying instances of Sitecore will require slightly different configuration on different servers. Different roles, like content management and content deployment, will require different settings and features to work. So it's not surprising that there are a variety of approaches to how you manage this configuration in your projects.
In the past I've often made use of separate config files, where you have a file for "config changes needed on all servers" and then further files for "config changes needed for CM servers", and even down to the level of "config changes needed on server CD01" if necessary. This works fine if your deployment process understands which files should go on which servers.
Recently, however, Sitecore have started to offer a "role based configuration" approach in the configuration of v9 – so you can deploy a single config file and the server can pick and choose sections of its configuration based on what role it is performing. But back in the real world, most of us are still supporting V8 (and older) sites, so is it possible for them to adopt something similar to this idea? Here's one approach that achieves something similar:
My first time having to configure Solr for Sitecore recently taught me a variety of new things. (I know – how have I managed to avoid it this long?) Most of the basics of the setup have been well documented elsewhere, so I won't repeat any of that. However setting up the site to use the Ninject DI container wasn't as smooth as the documentation suggested, so here are some notes on the issues I hit in case you find yourself stuck:
