Does this sound familiar: Your SharePoint server is running fine, but then it starts slowing down so much that the only way you can get things going again is by restarting the server? Eventually you track things down to a page that seems to be causing the problem. And what’s on the page? About 20 web parts, some of which are even third party content rollup web parts?
If you’re new to SharePoint you may not know that every time you add a web part to a SharePoint page, you are increasing the processing load, memory utilization, and network bandwidth the page uses. Put too many web parts, or web parts that use lots of data onto a frequently accessed page, and you could bring down your SharePoint server.
Web Parts to be Mindful Of
Content Rollup or Aggregator Web Parts are notorious for crashing servers when used by untrained content managers. Why? Let me answer the question with this question: would you ever write this kind of query?
SELECT *
FROM [A Table with Millions of Rows]
‘WHERE clauses are for the weak
Of course not. Even the most junior developer would know better than to query a huge amount of data from a very large database table. Developers get training, but users need a bit more protection. That’s one reason SharePoint sets up boundaries for database queries by dividing items into lists, libraries, and sites.
But content rollup and aggregator web parts can bypass the protection that SharePoint normally affords to its users. If an untrained content manager adds a rollup web part to a page and doesn’t properly set a scope for the data it returns, it’s just like running that SQL query without a WHERE clause against your entire 200 GB SharePoint database.
Don’t misunderstand, content rollup and aggregator web parts aren’t any more evil than SQL. But these web parts need to be configured by trained content managers.
Where Can I Get SharePoint Training?
Please practice safe content management.