New must-read SharePoint documentation released!

I am working on a series of posts regarding performance and troubleshooting on SharePoint which I had hoped to get posted before the end of the year, only time will tell if my workload cooperates on that. But, in the meantime we have released a ton of new documentation and cross referenced a lot of it to older docs that provided a wealth of information. The net result is that we have some new stuff and provided a lot of clarification or updates to old stuff. I have provided a quick overview of the things I liked in each of these docs below:

 

Planning and Deploying Service Pack 1 for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 in a Multi-server Environment

· Publicly state our position on IIS Application Pool recycling and provide a recommendation on how to configure it. (As of this moment there is an error on the virtual memory setting, it says 1300MB, it should say 1700MB…)

· Stronger recommendations to use 64-bit Web Front Ends

· Reiterated that you cannot use the /3Gb switch on Web Front Ends and explain why.

· Publicly commented on mixing 32-bit and 64-bit Web Front Ends.

· Clearly state that 4-5 Web Front Ends provides maximum throughput.

· Publicly stated our position on Web Gardens.

· Provided caveats around using explorer view.

· Publicly deprecated the use of “Download a Copy” with large files.

· Best practices on managing large lists and provided links to more detailed guidance including how to limit the creation of personal views.

Performance Recommendations for Storage Planning and Monitoring

· We publicly state that v3 is more resource intensive than v2.

· Provide clarification on content database size limit of 100GB.

· Publicly state that v3 is the last version of SharePoint to run on 32-bit hardware.

· Publicly state that gradual upgrade may require twice as much SQL resources.

· Publicly recommend SQL 2005 SP2 64-bit.

· Recommend adding more SQL servers when you have more than 4 Web Front Ends.

· Recommended 16GB of memory for SQL server in large deployments.

 

Some other stuff I would highly recommend would be:

Plan for software boundaries (Office SharePoint Server)

Manage lists and libraries with many items