A balance must be struck in every software application between performance and flexibility. Often, as is the case in 20/20 DataShed, these two things are mutually exclusive - when one increases the other decreases. Our primary objective when creating 20/20 DataShed was to build a product that performs very well but allows our customers the flexibility to customize the presentation as they see fit.
20/20 DataShed is shipped with a standard set of HTML templates and CSS which are appropriate for most business models. If you choose to customize the HTML templates, stylesheets, and the languages.xml file, be aware that your alterations may degrade the performance of the product. For example, if you re-create the summary(5)view_template(Default).html file and use the [MultiPhotoModule:] or [SubCategory_plural:] tokens, 20/20 DataShed will be required to perform a significant amount of math and create enormous amounts of dynamic HTML for each search result. Such things may cause the pages to process and download slower.
However, just the opposite is true too. If your business model does not require all the bells and whistles that are available in 20/20 DataShed, it may be possible to strip the HTML templates and improve the speed and performance of the product. For example, if your web site has little or no use for the [MapQuest:] token, then this could be removed from the HTML templates and the web server may process the pages faster.
The discussion on this page is not meant to worry you - it's simply intended to make you aware that your customizations have a very real effect on the performance of your web site. In some cases, the difference between our standard HTML templates and ones that you might create could be a few milliseconds.
In other cases, if your own HTML templates require a lot of extra processing, you might add a few hundred milliseconds to the runtime. This extra processing power is of little concern unless you're business is Google where every millisecond counts.
No.
The Internet Information Server (IIS) by Microsoft is a remarkable software and can handle a staggering amount of information with ease. The health of the web server shouldn't concern you as much as other issues: for example, are your pages enormous and do they download quickly to your vistors' web browser?
Yes.
A web server usually resides on a computer that is responsible for many tasks. It may serve other web sites; it may also be an email server; it may also be a streaming media server; it may also be a database server; or a DNS server; etc. All of these tasks require processing power and memory. So, while it's very rare that an ASP application will crash a web server it is possible for the web server to get overloaded. In most cases, this equates to speed (not 'crash'). Imagine a tractor-pull - the further one gets along the track, the weight increases and every step requires more energy.
Having said that, if you feel that your web site's performance is suffering, then we recommend that you first contact your web host to discover whether or not your web site is responsible for the decreased performance (or whether or not the server is suffering from other tasks and services).
Send Feedback