SharePoint 2010 Warm up script comparison

After SharePoint 2010 upgrade and many new features added, we have Sprint release every two weeks to provide new functions and it’s more common users complain it takes more time to load my site. Well, people add more web parts, more lists, and items to their sites. After IISReset or app pool reset or worker process cycle, all site pages will need to be compiled and cached again.  As a result, the first hit will be slower but the following hits goes much faster.

Buy looking into the available 2010 compatible script to "warm up" the SharePoint, we could categorize into three types. Here are the three types of the scripts.

1.      SharePoint API based script as console application

Two typical examples are SPWakeUp - Wake up your Sharepoint and WSS Sites and SpSiteWakeUp – Wake up your SharePoint Sites and their sub sites. Since the script is a wrapper around the API call to open the sites, it’s flexible to exclude the sites not need to be warmed up. However, in our case the people normally run this on production would be infrastructure administrators, it would be hard to convince them to run any .exe executable file on production without seeing the code and logic behind it.

2.      VB script based window script

Warm up your SharePoint servers is example for such type of the scripts used for SharePoint 2007 originally way back for Microsoft couse in 2006. This script is still working against SharePoint 2010 and in fact is used by all SharePoint 2010 Microsoft MSDN virtual labs. The script is flexible and you could use it for multiple purpose. While we are moving to C# and Powershell on our development side, this is not our preferred way due to the maintainability.

3.      Powershell based scripts

You could review such script from http://kirkhofer.wordpress.com/2008/10/18/sharepoint-warm-up-script/. This script was also used for SharePoint 2007 originally and it’s also work for 2010. The person who runs this could review the content of the script and the script is more maintainable. There are some enhancement you might do on this script to improve the efficiency and maintainability. Here are some thoughts.

·         Update the stsadm to Powershell since it has been deprecated.

·         Add filter so the script could exclude some webapps or some sites

If anyone has time to update the script to enhance the functionality, please share with us.