Best ways to Improve Sharepoint 2007 Performance?

OK we are at the end of our rope here, and I’d really appreciate feedback from the SO community.

Our basic issue is slow performance by our MOSS-based intranet--

Some environment info:

We have a MOSS standard edition for a collaboration based site.

• The sitedb is 29 Gb
• we have two VMWare based front end servers. (2x 32bit CPUS each)
• less than 1000 users spread over all timezones
• We have one big site collection with subsites.

General symptoms: Loading front page and pages that have been ‘warmed-up’ is pretty decent- but pages/sites off the beaten path are very slow to load.

We see spikes, where a page all of a sudden takes 30 seconds to load, vs its more normal 2

Here’s what we have done already:

• Scaled way back on crawling
• enabled object and blob caching
• optimized VMware setup
• followed the Microsoft IT whitepaper on MOSS sharepoint best practice (esp list size etc)

I don’t know what else to do here—Split into multiple site collections?

Switch to 64 bit front-end servers?

Would be great to hear from others who have been in similar situations.

You don't say how much memory your front end servers have - given that they are 32bit, I'll assume the maximum per worker process of roughly 2gb + change.

My advice? Switch to 64 bit, add more memory, and check that you are not using just one w3wp worker process per front end. Have a dig into "web gardens," that is to say where you configure multiple w3wp processes per front end. To start with, start with two workerprocesses per front end and see how that works out. Also make sure they are set to recycle, and that the recycling of each pair of worker processes do NOT overlap - having two+ workers means they can take turns to recycle without cutting access.

just my 0.02.

-Oisin