Social environment technical case study (SharePoint Server 2010)

 

Applies to: SharePoint Server 2010

This document describes a specific deployment of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. It 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 overview 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 with 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 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 Server 2010 environment described in this document is a production environment at a large, geographically distributed company. This environment hosts SharePoint My Sites that connect employees with one another and the information that they need. Employees use this environment to present personal information such as areas of expertise, past projects, and colleagues to the wider organization. The environment also hosts personal sites and documents for viewing, editing, and collaboration. My Sites are integrated with Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) to provide a central location that can be accessed from the browser and various client applications.

As many as 72,000 unique users visit the environment on a busy day, generating up to 180 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 social 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 overview for SharePoint Server 2010.

Web Servers

There are three Web servers in the farm, each with identical hardware. Two serve content, and the third is a dedicated search crawl target.

Web Server	WFE1-3
Processor(s)	2 quad core @ 2.33 GHz
RAM	16 GB
Operating system	Windows Server 2008, 64 bit
Size of the SharePoint drive	400 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 two application servers in the farm, each with identical hardware.

Application Server	APP1-4
Processor(s)	2 quad core @ 2.33 GHz
RAM	16 GB
OS	Windows Server 2008, 64 bit
Size of the SharePoint drive	400 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 two 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	64 GB
Operating system	Windows Server 2008, 64 bit
Storage and geometry	(1.25 TB * 6) Disk 1-4: SQL Data Disk 5: Logs Disk 6: TempDB
Number of network adapters	2
Network adapter speed	1 @ 100MB, 1 @ 1GB
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 Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Database – configure 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)	64
Average RPS at peak time (11 AM-3 PM)	112
Total number of unique users per day	69,814
Average concurrent users	639
Maximum concurrent users	1186
Total # of requests per day	4,045,677

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

User Agent	Requests	Percentage of Total
Outlook Social Connector Browser	1,808,963	44.71%
Search (crawl)	704,569	17.42%
DAV	459,491	11.36%
OneNote	266,68	6.59%
Outlook	372,574	9.21%
Browser	85,913	2.12%
Word	38,556	0.95%
Excel	30,021	0.74%
Office Web Applications	20,314	0.50%
SharePoint Workspaces	19,017	0.47%

Dataset

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

Dataset Characteristics	Value
Database size (combined)	1.5 TB
BLOB size	1.05 TB
Number of content databases	64
Number of Web applications	1
Number of site collections	87,264
Number of sites	119,400
Search index size (number of items)	5.5 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)	99.61%
Failure Rate	0.39%
Average memory used	0.79 GB
Maximum memory used	4.53 GB
Search Crawl % of Traffic (Search client requests / total requests)	17.42%

The following charts show 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)	99.854 : 0.146
Average Disk queue length	8.702
Disk Queue Length: Reads	30.518
Disk Queue Length: Writes	4.277
Disk Reads/sec	760.886
Disk Writes/sec	180.644
SQL Compilations/second	3.129
SQL Re-compilations/second	0.032
SQL Locks: Average Wait Time	125 ms
SQL Locks: Lock Wait Time	33.322 ms
SQL Locks: Deadlocks Per Second	0
SQL Latches: Average Wait Time	0 ms
SQL Cache Hit Ratio	20.1%

See Also

Other Resources

Resource Center: Capacity Management for SharePoint Server 2010