SharePoint Central Administration Web site takes a long time to load after an IIS Reset

Update 9/13/2012: The problem has been fixed in the August 2012 Cumulative update for SharePoint Foundation.  

Overview

I have recently come across an annoying problem, and I have seen it often enough that I decided to blog about it. Consider the following scenario:

You open your SharePoint Central Administration Website and it takes a long time to load the first time. After the initial load, the site is responsive and pages load and open fast. If you are experiencing these symptoms, you have come to the right place. Continue reading!

Why is it Slow?

In the process of initializing the SharePoint Central Administration website, SharePoint tries to find the security group IIS_WPG. It first checks the local computer for the group, if the group is not a local security group, SharePoint tries to find the group on the domain. If you have a lot of two-way trusts, this search can go on for several minutes, which is what causes the slowness when loading the site.

IIS_WPG: Do I really need it?

Why does SharePoint need IIS_WPG – that’s a different topic. This group used to be a local security group on the default installation of IIS 6 (Windows Server 2003) and SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) would add the SharePoint application pool accounts to this group. I don’t know what problems you will run into if you delete the IIS_WPG group in MOSS 2007/WSS 3.0, but you should definitely not delete it.

The IIS_WPG local security group in Windows Server 2003

The group went away with IIS7/Windows Server 2008, but SharePoint still tries to find it, which is what creates the slowness. This behavior is same for both MOSS 2007/WSS 3.0 and SharePoint 2010

The Solution

The solution in this case is simple. All you need to do is create a local security group named “IIS_WPG” on each SharePoint server in the farm, and after that, central administration web site should load without any delays.

Happy SharePointing!

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 17, 2012
  Hi, So you should not even have to add all accounts? Just create the group, that's it? I was always told it had something to do with cache, timers that run every night to clear things?

• Anonymous
  May 17, 2012
  That is correct. Just creating the group resolves the slow loading issue. If you are running MOSS/WSS 3.0 on Windows Server 2003, I would recommend that you add the application pool accounts to this group also just to be safe.

• Anonymous
  May 17, 2012
  @Filip, regarding your second comment. When you first open the central administratio site after an IISReset, it will take a few seconds to load anyway since the application pool is warming up and there is .NET Jitting going on, but if it takes several minutes to load, then it's most likely because of the IIS_WPG group.

• Anonymous
  February 21, 2013
  This is great advice! Thanks! Wondering why it is not coming from Microsoft KB........they should know better.

• Anonymous
  April 07, 2015
  I have installed my new environment using 3 VMs, one for SQL, one for WFE and one for AD, but CA performance is very slow, tried your trick but did not work. Do I need to check anything else ? Sal

• Anonymous
  April 07, 2015
  Sal, You probably just have a general slowness issue in the environment which could be causing the issue. I suggest checking your SQL performance for bottlenecks.

• Anonymous
  November 11, 2015
  Hi Tehnoon - Is this also applicable to SharePoint 2013 ?  Does SP2013 also look for a IIS_WPG group ?

• Anonymous
  November 11, 2015
  Hello Mario, this does not apply to SharePoint 2013 as IIS_WPG does not exist on Server 2008 which is the minimum requirement for SharePoint 2013. Also, the problem has been fixed in SharePoint 2010 via a Hotfix.

• Anonymous
  November 12, 2015
  Appreciate the quick response, and thanks for confirming !