Peter Seale's weblog

Friday, May 02, 2008 8:00:26 PM UTC 

Pop quiz, hotshot: how do you double your SharePoint farm's searching speed?

(scroll down for the secret answer! If you have a large or otherwise high-resolution monitor, pretend you have tunnel vision!)

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Do you need a hint?

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TRICK ANSWER: Switch to an alternative browser! Instant speed boost!

I'm not trying to start a fight

I've been working with SharePoint's search recently, and have come away duly impressed by its capabilities. Today I'm highlighting yet another positive aspect of SharePoint's Enterprise Search—the fact that it is incredibly fast, and faster than you probably think—and at the same time, maybe stomping a little on IE. Just a little.

The point is, a lot of the time you spend waiting for search results on a SharePoint portal is spent by IE rendering the page, not by the SharePoint server. So, okay, what does this mean, and why do I care?

Takeaways - what to do about it

• Keep in mind, as an option, that the SharePoint search web service exists, and is a perfectly good way to serve up search requests on your other (non-SharePoint) portal. And it's fast.
• If you're demoing SharePoint, and especially as a Web Content Management tool, then by all means use the fastest browser available. If you're trying to show off SharePoint's capabilities, show them how fast it runs a search! But don't settle for IE's speeds. SharePoint is unfairly perceived as an "always slow" application, and we need to try and break that perception. Yes, it can be slow; no, it doesn't have to be slow. It can be quite snappy, believe it or not.
• Note also, that you don't need to load most of what's on a SharePoint search results page. I've been digging into a MS-PL (thank you!)-licensed Search Center branding project on CodePlex, and I'm amazed at how much cruft we can remove without losing anything. It should go without saying, but: the more you remove, the faster the page is served up, and the faster the browser renders. Win-win! Trim that search page! Take a chainsaw to it!