Think a DotNetNuke site has to be slow because of all that dynamic rendering?

Think again!  After you have added all your content and got your site looking like you want it, then chances are that more people will be retrieving the same exact page over and over again.  Time for the beauty of ASP.Net caching to tame this beast.

I had done this on my site with good results and have been trying to tweak out the HTML & CSS to get the fastest load time possible, but I wasn't able to break the 5 second barrier until tonight (hmm, make that last night, I guess it is early morning already).

I knew my css navigation menu was probably taking the most time because I was thinking that I couldn't cache it since the menu has to be built depending on the security role of the currently logged in user.  Then the thought came to me that if I could just get the home page to load faster when no one is logged in, then at least I could make sure that no one left because it was taking too long for my site to load.  After digging into the code I also realized that I didn't have that many different tabs, so why not add the active tab id as part of the cache key.  So now I have a cached version of each tab's NavMenu that is only used for the anonymous user.

Add the Blowery compression module, and whip in caching of modules, along with a nice CSS based skin, and that is one sweet recipe for speed.

If you want to experience a super-fast DNN site, you can check it out at www.snapsis.com.