Enterprise intranet collaboration environment technical case study (SharePoint Server 2010)

 

Applies to: SharePoint Server 2010

This article describes a specific deployment of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, that includes the following:

• Technical case study environment specifications, such as hardware, farm topology and configuration.

• The workload, that includes the number, and types, of users or clients, and environment usage characteristics.

• Technical case study farm dataset, that includes database contents and search indexes.

• Health and performance data that is specific to the environment.

In this article:

• Prerequisite information

• Introduction to this environment

• Specifications

• Workload

• Dataset

• Health and Performance Data

Prerequisite information

Before reading this document, make sure that you understand the key concepts behind SharePoint Server 2010 capacity management. The following documentation will help you learn about the recommended approach to capacity management and provide context for helping you understand how to make effective use of the information in this document, and also define the terms used throughout this document.

For more conceptual information about performance and capacity that you might find valuable in understanding the context of the data in this technical case study, see the following documents:

• Capacity management and sizing for SharePoint Server 2010

• SharePoint Server 2010 capacity management: Software boundaries and limits

Introduction to this environment

This white paper describes an actual SharePoint Server 2010 environment at Microsoft. Use this document to compare to your planned workload and usage characteristics. If your planned design is similar, you can use the deployment described here as a starting point for your own installation.

This document includes the following:

• Specifications, which include hardware, topology, and configuration.

• Workload, which is the demand on the farm that includes the number of users, and the usage characteristics.

• Dataset that includes database sizes.

• Health and performance data that is specific to the environment.

This document is part of a series of Performance and capacity technical case studies (SharePoint Server 2010) about SharePoint environments at Microsoft.

The SharePoint environment described in this document is a production environment at a large, geographically distributed company. The environment hosts very important team sites and publishing portals for internal teams for enterprise collaboration, organizations, teams, and projects. Sites created in this environment are used as communication portals, applications for business solutions, and general collaboration. Self-service site creation is used to provision site collections. Custom code is not permitted.

As many as 88,900 unique users visit the environment on a busy day, generating up to 669 requests per second (RPS) during peak hours. Because this is an intranet site, all users are authenticated.

The information that is provided in this document reflects the enterprise intranet publishing environment on a typical day.

Specifications

This section provides detailed information about the hardware, software, topology, and configuration of the case study environment.

Hardware

This section provides details about the server computers that were used in this environment.

Note

This environment is scaled to accommodate pre-release builds of SharePoint Server 2010 and other products. Hence, the hardware deployed has larger capacity than necessary to serve the demand typically experienced by this environment. This hardware is described only to provide additional context for this environment and serve as a starting point for similar environments.
It is important to conduct your own capacity management based on your planned workload and usage characteristics. For more information about the capacity management process, see Capacity management and sizing for SharePoint Server 2010.

Web Servers

There are four Web servers in the farm, each with identical hardware. Three serve content, and the fourth is a dedicated search crawl target.

Web Server	WFE1-4
Processor(s)	2 quad core @ 2.33 GHz
RAM	32 GB
OS	Windows Server® 2008, 64 bit
Size of the SharePoint drive	205 GB
Number of network adapters	2
Network adapter speed	1 Gigabit
Authentication	Windows NTLM
Load balancer type	Hardware load balancing
Software version	SharePoint Server 2010 (pre-release version)
Services running locally	Central Administration Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Incoming E-Mail Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Web Application Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Workflow Timer Service Search Query and Site Settings Service SharePoint Server Search
Services consumed from a federated Services farm	User Profile Service Web Analytics Web Service Business Data Connectivity Service Managed Metadata Web Service

Application Server

There are four application servers in the farm, each with identical hardware.

Application Server	APP1-4
Processor(s)	4 six core @ 2.40 GHz
RAM	64 GB
OS	Windows Server 2008, 64 bit
Size of the SharePoint drive	300 GB
Number of network adapters	1
Network adapter speed	1 Gigabit
Authentication	Windows NTLM
Load balancer type	Hardware load balancing
Software version	SharePoint Server 2010 (pre-release version)
Services running locally	Office Web Apps Excel PowerPoint Secure Store Usage and Health State Service

Database Servers

There is a SQL cluster with 2 database servers, each with identical hardware, one of the servers is active and the other is passive for redundancy.

Database Server	DB1-2
Processor(s)	4 quad core @ 2.4 GHz
RAM	32 GB
OS	Windows Server 2008, 64-bit
Storage and geometry	(1.25 TB * 7) + 3 TB Disk 1-4: SQL Data Disk 5: Logs Disk 6: TempDB
Number of network adapters	2
Network adapter speed	1 Gigabit
Authentication	Windows NTLM
Software version	SQL Server 2008

Topology

The following diagram shows the topology for this farm.

Configuration

The following table enumerates settings that were changed that affect performance or capacity in the environment.

Setting	Value	Notes
Usage Service Trace Log – days to store log files (default: 14 days)	5 days	The default is 14 days. Lowering this setting can save disk space on the server where the log files are stored.
QueryLoggingThreshold SharePoint Foundation Database – change QueryLoggingThreshold to 1 second	1 second	The default is 5 seconds. Lowering this setting can save bandwidth and CPU on the database server.
Database Server – Default Instance Max degree of parallelism	1	The default is 0. To ensure optimal performance, we strongly recommend that you set max degree of parallelism to 1 for database servers that host SharePoint Server 2010 databases. For more information about how to set max degree of parallelism, see max degree of parallelism Option(https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=189030).

Workload

This section describes the workload, which is the demand on the farm that includes the number of users, and the usage characteristics.

Workload Characteristics	Value
Average Requests per Second (RPS)	157
Average RPS at peak time (11 AM-3 PM)	350
Total number of unique users per day	69,702
Average concurrent users	420
Maximum concurrent users	1,433
Total # of requests per day	18,866,527

This table shows the number of requests for each user agent.

User Agent	Requests	Percentage of Total
Search (crawl)	6,384,488	47%
DAV	2,446,588	18%
Browser	730,139	5%
OneNote	665,334	5%
Office Web Applications	391,599	3%
SharePoint Designer	215,695	2%

Dataset

This section describes the case study farm dataset that includes database sizes and Search indexes.

Dataset Characteristics	Value
Database size (combined)	7.5 TB
BLOB size	6.8 TB
Number of content databases	87
Number of Web applications	2
Number of site collections	34,423
Number of sites	101,598
Search index size (number of items)	23 million

Health and Performance Data

This section provides health and performance data that is specific to the Case Study environment.

General Counters

Metric	Value
Availability (uptime)	99.1%
Failure Rate	0.9%
Average memory used	3.4 GB
Maximum memory used	16.1 GB
Search Crawl % of Traffic (Search client requests / total requests)	47%
ASP.NET Requests Queued	0.00

The following charts show the average CPU utilization and latency for this environment:

In this document, latency is divided into four categories.  The 50th percentile latency is typically used to measure the server’s responsiveness. It means that half of the requests are served within that response time. The 95th percentile latency is typically used to measure spikes in server response times. It means that 95% of requests are served within that response time, and therefore 5% of the requests experience slower response times.

Database counters

Metric	Value
Read/Write Ratio (IO Per Database)	99.8 : 0.2
Average Disk queue length	2.3
Disk Queue Length: Reads	2
Disk Queue Length: Writes	0.3
Disk Reads/sec	131.33
Disk Writes/sec	278.33
SQL Compilations/second	9.9
SQL Re-compilations/second	0.07
SQL Locks: Average Wait Time	225 ms
SQL Locks: Lock Wait Time	507 ms
SQL Locks: Deadlocks Per Second	3.8
SQL Latches: Average Wait Time	14.3 ms
SQL Server: Buffer Cache Hit Ratio	74.3%

See Also

Other Resources

Resource Center: Capacity Management for SharePoint Server 2010