SharePoint Designer performance is poor at best

David Lozzi

Howdy,

I'm using Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 (12.0.4518.1014) on my Windows XP SP2 Workstation, Pentium D 3Ghz with 2GB RAM, to update my Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 12.0.0.4518 installed on two servers: SVR1 - Dual Xeon 5120 1.86ghz, 4GB RAM, Win2k3 R2 Standard SP2 hosts Central Admin, Help Search, E-Mail and Web Application. SVR2 - Quad Xeon E5320 1.86Ghz, 12GB RAM, Win2k3 R2 Enterprise SP2 hosts Services Database (SQL 2005). These servers are only a couple months old, so performance on their side had better not be the issue! Plus, as far as performance monitor is concerned, they are almost running idle with the site runs, gotta love power house machines.

Anyway, when using SPD on my workstation it drags along. I am able to get stuff done but five times slower than normal. For example, if i'm editing a form (EditForm.aspx) for a list, and I type some words, like "Enter the person's name and information below", it displays the text in chunks of three characters at a time in about a second and a half to two seconds (using the perfected "one-one-thousand....two-one-thousand" method).So a sentence like that takes an annoyingly long time to finish. Then there's dragging objects from one cell to another in a table. That takes a good 14 "one-thousands". During the waiting period, the SPDESIGN.exe process spikes from an idle 04 CPU to 60 CPU and bounces around 40 to 60 for the duration of the action. Performance on SVR1 is more or less minimal. The w3wp process spikes to 25 CPU for about 2 one-thousands. SVR2 couldn't be more bored, running around 1% CPU for the entire duration.

So, what do you suggest I can't continue working like this as it is taking so much longer than it should to do such simple tasks. Thanks for your time and your efforts.

David Lozzi

The Mossman

Hmmm... sounds a bit fishy. Yes SPD is a resource hog. I have a Dual Core (non duo) with 2 gigs of ram and while I wouldn't call it speedy, its not awful either. Its mainly slow in design mode and when connecting to the server (like when I open a new site). I don't use the visual designer very much though. You could try going with the code view and see if performance improves.

Paul Galvin

I don't have an answer, but I can say that what you're seeing is not normal. I use SPD a bit now and then and never see anything like that.

You might consider trying this out on a colleague's work station and see if you can isolate it that way.

If you figure it out, please post the answer here.

--Paul Galvin

nickeales

I have the same problem. I am running 32-bit vista with sharepoint designer 2007 installed.

Starting up spdesign.exe is fine. When I load any page which has the default wss masterpage loaded the memory leak hits. Memory usage rises until a certain peak point anywhere from 200-800mb (alongside it using 100% of one of the CPU cores during this process) then it resets the memory back to 10mb and refreshes the page only to have the process start all over again. I can't use the Sharepoint Designer at all when it comes to building pages.

Anyone have any idea

DavidLozzi

From what I can tell, the larger the list the slower SharePoint Designer performs. I found that updating the forms in Source view works best, but you'll need to know HTML.

dziogo2

Yes yes yes --- SPD is a PIG - i work with what I would call small - to medium size lists (appx 200-300 items in each) and have custom web part pages where i display (filtered) data from 2-3 of such lists the page is almost unworkable when opened in SPD "design" mode. When I add simple text every key type takes 1-2 seconds and CPU goes to 90% on my 2 GB RAM 2 Ghz Duo machine! I was nable to find any official acknowledgement of this problem. I also tried this on 2-3 different but powerfull machines and found the same results. I also tried editing pages from 2 or so different sharepoint servers and it is consistently slow. I am at a point i gave up doing any development on WSS as it is impossible with SPD and do not want to mess with code....

On top of this every time page which has DataView web parts in it opens in design view it displays ALL items in the list even when i set the "Data View Preview" option to limit to 1 item (for previewing) only... Next time i open this page it defaults to ALL items again and i have to manually set these preview settings to 1 item, which takes literally 2-3 minutes waiting for the page to refresh.

I just do not see how anyone can edit pages which contain DataView parts with lists which have 100+ items in them without going nuts.

DavidLozzi

I agree, it is difficult to get anything done. I had my customer who bought about $40k in hardware (servers, firewalls, etc) to implement this corporate wide (300-700 users) start worring that their investment was not as good as it needed to be. After I found a few other posts that this is a "known issue" it calmed them down and now they know to expect longer (more costly) development times until MS fixes it. RIDICULOUS!

Michael A. Vickers

Just wanted to toss my two cents in and confirm this problem.

Using XP with SP Designer 2007 on a dual core 2.0 Ghz, 2 GB RAM laptop. I noticed that this happens when in designer or split mode, and the more complex the page the more likely SPD ends up hanging. It's happening to me on different sites hosted on different servers.

Where I really notice it is on EditForm.aspx pages where I'm hiding the canned form and editing a custom edit form I've added to the page. I get the chunky text editing as described above, as well as saving that takes forever. Sometimes I'll just alt-tab back to SPD and it'll hang. Usually when the system is hanging after a save command or alt-tabbing back to SPD I see that once the hanging stops the status bar reports "Rendering Page." And when I say hang, I see that one of the cores on the CPU is pegged out at 100% utilization. I perceive that the time span of the hang increases each time until eventually I'll force quite SPD after it's been unresponsive for a minute or two.

I am not exaggerating when I say it takes me more than twice as long to get anything done with SPD. It's an abomination. I hate this thing. Microsoft, please fix it, or give me a way to do the equivalent in Visual Studio 2005.

tstaddon

I can confirm that - I'm developing on a server with 8GB of RAM and even if I'm the only person logged into the server, it still takes over 20 seconds to open EditForm.aspx in SPD.

But then I am finding Sharepoint itself to be horrendously slow in every possible way - for instance a "select * from List where ID between X and Y" query takes more than 10 seconds to display in the browser on the server console - even though the list in question has only 34 records in it and we haven't gone live yet!

If anyone from Microsoft is here, I want an explanation.

I can link the data into an Access database on a Pentium III PC with 128MB of RAM over the other end of a 1MB link from the Sharepoint server, and that machine will present the list data to its user in less than 10 seconds. In other words, it takes the quad-core server with 8GB of RAM on which the Sharepoint site and data resides, so long to render the same data from its own hard disk in Internet Explorer that I'd be better off having a PIII PC with Microsoft Access doing the job for it.

sercan

ditto

I have a pentium 4 3.2ghz 1GB RAM and its freaking slow opening WebSites, specialy MasterPages.

nickeales

This is still an issue after SP1. The performance makes this almost impossible to do anything with. It gets even worse if you're working with lists of 500 items and above. Would be great if somehow they could just dump sharepoint designer and use the proper visual studio ide instead.

Anonymous657567

Same issue here. Sharepoint Designer will max my CPU for 10-50 seconds depending on the operation. It is a roll of the dice when working with large lists if it will even come back. The designer should be rendering placeholder's and not trying to pull in entire lists. What I find very odd is that if I am working with a large list, 1000+ items, sharepoint designer can take well over a minute to open the page, but if I open it with a web browser it only takes 5-10 seconds.

I wonder if there are any plans to improve the viability of this product. For now I will be using code view exclusively.

Michael A. Vickers

Here is something that I've found that helps. It doesn't completely eliminate the problem, but it makes working with SPD a little more bearable.

If you are working with a custom dataform or dataview, configure the dataform/dataview to use sample data rather than pulling data from the datasource its linked to.

Michael

JXJ

Not only is the performance poor, it has some annoying bugs.

For example, if you have multiple connected web parts on a page, if you make a change to the page with SPD, it will randomly insert an extra WebPartPagesPProxyWebPartManager tag and the page errors when you view it in MOSS.

When it does this, I have to switch to the code view of the page and find the extra tag (start and end) it inserted (not an easy thing to find) and remove it so the page will load.

johnmcclain77

I'm having the same problem with slowing to a crawl. They need to fix this soon.