Hi there,

We have a slow Sharepoint. When i say slow i mean it can take up to 20 seconds to load something slow. I understand this is not normal. I get complaints about how the old Sharepoint 2003 was super fast and 2013 is slow compared to it. So i tried to make it faster, i looked up the forums and websites and i disabled distributed cache, medling with certificates, giving more ram and cpu, disable continous crawl, disabled sandboxed code service, revoke clr check, disable health&usage data collection, turn off diagnostic logging, i tried certain IIS tweaks, but nothing seems to make it as fast as the old sharepoint 2003. 

Our Sharepoint 2013 SP1 is a virtual machine on an ESX server (HP BladeServer), it has 16 GB of ram, a 16 core allocation, thick provisioned disks. The virtual machine is a windows 2012R2 standard, with Sharepoint, Project Server and SQL Server 2014 installed on it. So we have no network related issues as everything is on one machine local. Even so, users say that sharepoint is slow, and i can agree, i mean its not super fast like the old 2003 version. And even when i login on the virtual machine and try to access sharepoint as a localhost is the same delay, so no difference over the network.

Anyone has any idea on what can be done to make it faster? Any Sharepoint, IIS, SQL optimizations i can make? 

Thank you in advance.

16GB is way too low for that server. A couple things I would do:

1) Lower the amount of vCPUs allocated. ESX can suffer a performance penalty if the VM doesn't require the # of vCPUs assigned.

2) Increase the amount of vRAM to at least 24GB, if not higher. 24GB is a minimum for SharePoint + SQL on the same server.

3) Split the server roles out -- at the very least, move SQL to it's own dedicated VM.

16GB is way too low for that server. A couple things I would do:

1) Lower the amount of vCPUs allocated. ESX can suffer a performance penalty if the VM doesn't require the # of vCPUs assigned.

2) Increase the amount of vRAM to at least 24GB, if not higher. 24GB is a minimum for SharePoint + SQL on the same server.

3) Split the server roles out -- at the very least, move SQL to it's own dedicat

24GB is the minimum requirement for your configuration:

That said, yes you should limit your SQL Server, but 2GB may be too low. Note that Microsoft doesn't expect you to use this configuration in a production environment.