SharePoint takes yonks to spin up, especially if you’ve deployed a workflow assembly to the GAC and you need to bounce IIS using an iisreset. It’s typically noticeable using STSADM.
I came across this post and it’s which talks about signed .Net assemblies making calls to the Certificate Revocation List. Here’s a snippet:
The problem is that when loading signed assemblies the .net Framework checks the Internet based Certificate Revocation List. As our servers have, like most secure environments, no outgoing connections to the public Internet, the connection to crl.microsoft.com times out after what appears to be 30 seconds. It probably does this a couple of times in succession, causing a 2 minute wait when spinning up SharePoint.
After the timeout the assembly is still loaded and the software works as expected, though very slow every time a new signed assembly is loaded for the first time, which happens a lot. The worst thing is that no entries are written to the event log and no exceptions are thrown so you are left completely in the dark about why your application is so bloody slow.
They mention a few things, like adding crl.microsoft.com to your hosts file. I’ve yet to try this, but it may be useful in speeding up GAC deployments.
More info here:
- http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2009/05/26/3244913.aspx
- http://www.muhimbi.com/blog/2009/04/new-approach-to-solve-sharepoints.html
- http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/936707
- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb629393.aspx
And a few warmup scripts