This is a summary of the session: SharePoint 2010 Capacity and Performance Management held by kfir ami-ad and Zohar Raz

Maybe the most important thing to understand when talking about Capacity and Performance management in SharePoint 2010 is that is so much new things included. In fact it’s three times more services shipped with 2010 compared to 2007. This has the effect that we will not utilize less servers. Rather more. One thing that hits me from the first 2.5 days here is that whenever there is slides showing farm topologies it has tons of tons of servers in it. I believe that if you will use many of the new Services you will need to scale-out and scale-out a lot because of the extra load on all tiers. WFE will have more work to do and the database will have a lot more work to do then before.

But Microsoft has implemented a couple of really useful new features for us. For instance they have worked a lot with making the pages lighter and now the rendering of pages is done “bit-by-bit” instead of waiting for everything to load as it is today.

If you are running the Office 2010 Client the savings will be handled in a much more efficient way and the save will be done in the background with help from a new protocol, Cobalt.

As mentioned before throttling is something new in SharePoint 2010. This makes it possible set hours to when end users for instance can make task like delete a list with hundreds of thousand or even a million items. Doing that during “office hours” will cause extreme load on your SQL and therefore also cause latency problems. But to throttle this you can set up so that this kind of tasks are only available during off peak times. The users will then get a message when they try to perform the task saying that this is not allowed at the specific time.

But there is also something new introduced called HTTP throttling which means that SharePoint can “pause” low-priority tasks like for instance crawling for just a short time meanwhile it handles other complex tasks.

Another new thing is the Development dashboard where admins are able to switch the page view so that at the bottom of the page they get a lot of useful information about the rendering of the page. (I have one picture below showing this)

Last but definitely not least they have introduced a logging database. This makes it so much easier to analyze the server performance. In the demo they used excel to take out reports from the logging DB and by doing that they saw some latency problems. With the info from the DB they could then track that down to the search account. So with some tweaking they set down the amount of threads the crawled used and the performance was much better. They will probably not ship any graphic interface for this but they promise that the SPDiag 2010 will come post RTM with the SharePoint Administration Tool Kit 2010.