Performance Archives - Flux Digital Blog

It’s been a while since I had to look how best to manage Sitecore versions, but after seeing some performance issues related to lots of versions for some items on the CM this week It was time to revisit removing unneeded Sitecore versions.

Research

Amusingly my search turned up an SSE post with an answer from myself from about 5 years ago: https://sitecore.stackexchange.com/questions/507/limiting-version-numbers-copying-old-versions-to-archive-for-easy-access/525

Further Googling shows not much seems to have changed in that time. Some modules are however no longer supported or are compatible with Sitecore 9. I did find some links that gave me a few ideas though.

Our requirements were to find any items with more than 10 versions and then remove any versions other than the most recent ten unless an version is the currently published version or the version has been updated on the past 3 months. The idea behind this is that we wanted to remove only versions that were old and not updated recently but leave versions that are recent even if there are a lot of them for actively edited pieces of content.

The Script

Given the various modules available for managing versions are out of date and we only needed to this on an adhoc basis I decided to turn to trusty SPE to write a report which initially reported on items with 10 or more versions and then listed how many items to keep and how many to remove.

I was aware that Out of the box SPE has an report for item versions, so I used this as a basis for mine but added the check for if the version is the published version or has been edited within the past 3 months.

I then expanded on this to generate detailed reports of all the versions to keep and versions to remove.

Lastly added some options within the report to allow the item versions to be removed after the report has run an also if to archive the items to disk and/or the archive database table.

The result of this is that I could just run this in report mode first for analysis and then with the ‘Archive Versions & Generate Reports’ option selected to also remove the un-needed items.

Here is the script:

If you wish to change the number of months to a longer or shorter period you can update this variable value: $months = -3

When running the report with ‘Archive Versions & Generate Reports’ option selected it will ask you to confirm before removing items to be on the safe side:

Note that in newer versions of SPE the Remove-ItemVersion command archives items by default. However in the version we were using (5.1) this doesn’t happen so I added code to archive to the database before removing the item version.

Results

After the report has run an summary of results is shown and they can be downloaded in excel or csv format etc.

2 Other Spreadsheets are also automatically created and downloaded:

1. Versions to Keep – all the versions that will be kept for each item (these should correspond with the report above)

2. Versions to Remove – all the versions that should be removed for each item (these should correspond with the report above)

Running this in our production environment (after extensive testing) resulted in over 6,000 un-needed item versions being removed and over 7,000 being kept. This took around 40 minutes to run in total and the logs show info on what is happening.

Nearly halving our item versions means we should see some performance benefits and also it tidies up our database.

This also provides the added benefit of 3 reports we can reference if needed and the ability to restore versions from the archive if we need to in future for whatever reason. We plan to empty the archive in 6 months or so when we are sure these versions are not needed.

Hopefully someone else will find these scripts useful for managing item versions in Sitecore too. Feel free to edit it for your own use-case, please test carefully in a non-production environment though before running it.

Useful Links

There were some useful links I found regarding managing versions, including an SitecoreVersionPruner SPE script that I found after I’d written mine which looks really good:

https://github.com/danielrolfe/SitecoreVersionPruner

https://thesitecorist.net/2019/05/11/removing-old-versions-using-sitecore-scheduled-tasks/

https://briancaos.wordpress.com/2019/03/01/sitecore-delete-old-item-versions/

https://www.logicalfeed.com/posts/1195/sitecore-powershell-script-to-remove-all-language-versions-except-one

https://robearlam.com/blog/extending-sitecore-revolver-to-remove-old-versions

Sitecore Experience Editor is very powerful but if you have lots of components on a page it can be slow to load sometimes. Because of this as a Sitecore developer you often find yourself looking at what you can do to speed it up. The first steps are usually to ensure you are following the recommendations in Sitecores Performance Tuning Guide. Also in more recent versions of Sitecore such as Sitecore 8.2 there are improvements in the performance of Experience Editor by Lazy Loading components in the Ribbon and so on – so if upgrading in the immediate future is an option this is recommended. If it isn’t and you are stuck on Sitecore 8.1 then also look at the following potential improvements: Disabling the My Items count (there is also a Support Hotfix for this now) and turning off the Suggested Tests count.

What else can I do to speed up Experience Editor?

So as the title of this post suggests we can also look at hiding components or partials that are not needed during Experience Editing. This might be things like a Google Tag Manager partial, Social Share Buttons or in our case ReciteMe and a partial that got a list of notifications from a 3rd party feed. These are all things that don’t need to be loaded when using Experience Editor and add to the page load time.

Show me the code

There are a number of ways to do this but since were using Sitecore MVC it seemed nice to do it with an MVC FilterAttribute. Create a class with the following code:

using System.Web.Mvc;
public class ExcludeFromExperienceEditor : FilterAttribute, IActionFilter
{
public virtual void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext)
{
if (Sc.Context.PageMode.IsExperienceEditorEditing || Sc.Context.PageMode.IsExperienceEditor)
{
filterContext.Result = new EmptyResult();
}
}

public void OnActionExecuted(ActionExecutedContext filterContext)
{
// Not required
}
}

This uses the inbuilt Sitecore PageMode.IsExperienceEditorEditing and PageMode.IsExperienceEditor to check if Experience Editor is being used. It then returns an empty view result to the controller.

Then decide which of your components and partials are not needed in Experience Editor and decorate their controller actions with the new FilterAttribute like so:

public class GoogleTagManagerPartialController : BasePartialController
{
[ExcludeFromExperienceEditor]
[ChildActionOnly]
public ActionResult Index()
{
//code removed for simplicity
}
}

Thats all there is to it. You can exclude as many components in this way as you like very quickly and you should see some performance gains from doing so. Just make sure you don’t accidentally exclude anything your content editors need to see when editing the page!

Feel free to tweet me or leave a comment if you have other ways of doing this or some improvements.

Tag: Performance

Removing Unneeded Sitecore Versions with SPE