SharePoint Himadrish

How to manage SharePoint application in a large farm.

Application and memory management in SharePoint:
In order to run a SharePoint application in a large farm smoothly you need to be taken care on many areas. To manage SharePoint farm from any kind of crashing or memory leak issue, you should implement some kind of rule to protect site administrator and site collection administrator to upload any third party web part or feature. It seems that many associates in the organization (may be a site administrator) continuous research on SharePoint and came to know few web part which basically seems to fill up their needs or project specific needs. It is very easy to install any feature just installing the .WSP file in the WFS.

Installing the web part is much more interesting case. People can simply upload the web part in the site collection and start using this. And it is common and expected that the associated team or site administrator have not done any kind of regression or performance testing those webpart or feature before using which in turns produce a lot of memory issues in the farm. For example, if a webpart consume around 16k of memory and the object is not properly destroyed, then after completing its life cycle, the memory is consumed by this control will not be return to the pull of memory. So, if 50 users are started to use this webpart, a total of 800K of memory will be wasted in the WFS. This could bring down the application pool and the site will not be available to could be very slow.

Site and space management in SharePoint:
Life cycle of a SharePoint site is generally the duration of the project. Team sites are created base on the organization projects. Associated meeting works space also has been created by the site administrator. Farm administrator need to keep an eye on this and need to inform associated site administrator to shut down the site if the project was over. This will help to manage the existing space, save the crawling time, and let the existing content databases to keep continue to have the new site in its own space.

The question is how to identify which site are getting idle or inactive. The simple way is to check the document library in team site. It will let you know the last date when any content within this document library was edited. However if you have some good log analysis tool, you can see the IIS log to see the last access date to individual team site.
As a safety purpose you can take a backup of this site by using STSADM command and simple clean that space.

User management in SharePoint:
Peoples entering and exist from the company and in IT sector, it is often. This is the responsibilities of the individual site administrator to manage their users. Allow and add the new user into the SharePoint site and purge the non existing user from the site. Updating a SharePoint site periodically help the organization as well as farm administrator to resolve the issue quickly.

Database storage space management in SharePoint:

Database space is no doubt costly to the organization. And the important factor is SharePoint is growing and growing in exponential manner. I can bet within one year you can find there is 300% growth in SharePoint which is turn reflect the same growth in database space because SharePoint stores everything in database. So, if you knock the door within one year and need more space, I’m pretty much sure most of the cases infrastructure team will push the ball on your court by saying you have to manage your existing space and you can keep continue to next three months maxim using whatever you have. Typical situation!!

I have faced such situation many times during last couple of years, and it was so frustrated to let the infrastructure team to understand people accepting SharePoint, started to depend on this and it is the backbone of several critical applications. If we failure to keep continue SharePoint, the productivity will be loss. I faced the situation where only couple of MBs of database space was left in a total of terabyte space. People started shouting they were unable to upload document, not able to save data in the SharePoint list libraries, InfoPath was not working and so on. It was one of the challenging and hyper critical situation I every faced in SharePoint.

It was a very hard time and it was team effort to came out from that hyper critical situation. Many thanks to my team members, their dedication and hard worked helped the organization to keep SharePoint running and reestablished it at a stable state. The question is how did we manage? Analysis the situation we place some short term and long term plan to recover from this situation.

Short term plan to recover SharePoint disk space
To retain some more space, first thing we did was to truncate db log file. Couple of GB space we were able to restore which actually gave the breadth to the system for next two-three days and this is no doubt very short time and temporary solution. The objective was to retain more space and there was no scope to add additional disk drive into the system. However still sub sites were created and people uploading the documents and keep continuing with versioning data in SharePoint.

Mass emailing could be a choice to aware site collection administrator to check their individual site and cleanup as much as possible. However that wouldn’t be affected immediately as we had a very short period. We did some tricky thing, find out the most inactive sites and those site which have consume more than 3 GB of database space. Started to fire the email to individual site administrators and pushed them to clean up or allowed to purge the site IMMEDIATELY. It worked ?

Few things need to consider while site administrator started to clean up their space. First review the SharePoint site and if the project was over and you can download few important files, then allowed us to shut down this site.

For the case where site is still using and it has lot of data. Helped the site administrator to review the site collection reports and find out which document library/list consumed how much space. Review the document library, delete those documents which are not required at this moment, if it is required to keep version old document, only keep last three versions. It helped a lot to retain space. Review the meeting site, if not required purged those one.

However those were not big enough to reach at workaround state for next quarter. For the long term plan, we had archiving, backup policies, close out policies, site management policies and so on which I will be discussed more details in next part.