Performance issue in newly installed & configured on-premises SP 2013 farm

Recently one of our project faced performance issue in newly installed & configured on-premises SharePoint 2013 farm. I have looked in to this problem and came to know something interesting, so I am sharing my experience with you all.

Problem statement

The SharePoint servers had frequent 8321 events error related to certificate validation. It turns out that SharePoint periodically checks the validity of the Security Token service certificates used for signing security tokens. To check the validity of these certificates the server tries to connect to the Internet and if there is no connectivity from the server to the Internet, it takes 15 sec before the connection attempt times out. This majorly impacts the overall performance of the SharePoint farm.

Solution

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2625048 is a KB article describing the issue. This is relevant since our servers do not have Internet connectivity.

Per the suggestions in the document, I first tried importing the certificate to the Trusted Root Authorities, which did not fix the error however disabling the automatic certificate update cleared the errors.

I have also enabled the Minimum download strategy feature on the site. This is a new feature introduced in SharePoint 2013 that improves client rendering performance by downloading only the changes when navigating page to page.

With the above changes I see a good improvement in the overall site performance and pages only take 2-6 sec to load. The search and user log in which was terribly slow also works much better now.

Read complete details on my TechNet Wiki article

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