SharePoint 2013 MMS Performance Issues

Loading the SharePoint term store page is for the most part a pain free process which takes no longer to load than many other SharePoint pages.

I have however recently been investigating poor performance when loading the term store management page (_layouts/15/termstoremanager.aspx).

When loading the page the message appears: ‘Term store operation in progress, this may take a few moments.’

To narrow down what was causing the delay in loading I enabled developer tools in my IE browser.

And I could see from the network capture that the GetGroups POST was taking up to 30 seconds in some cases.

As this issue was only being reported by term store administrators I also tested this with a general user with read only access to the term store and the performance was as expected with load times of a second or two.

So by simply adding myself to the term store administrators group I could recreate the issue.

Digging into the ULS logs I could see that SharePoint was in fact trying to resolve all of the users in the term store administrators group.

What I found was a large group of term store administrators in the farm (entire support and development team) and these were all listed in the term store administrators box shown below.

So before loading the page for term store administrators it will first be doing multiple name resolutions, also any users listed in the term store administrators or managers groups but no longer in AD will cause extra delay in this process.

SPRequest.GetNTFullNamefromLoginEx: UserPrincipalName=, AppPrincipalName= ,bstrLogin=domain\testuser

Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy.WebServices.TermStoreGenericObject..ctor(Group group) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy.WebServices.TermStoreGenericObject..ctor(Group group)     at Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy.WebServices.TaxonomyInternalService.GetGroups

SPAce encoded user claim i:0#.w|domain\testuser cannot be resolved. Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: Cannot complete this action.  Please try again. ---> System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException: Cannot complete this action.  Please try again.     at Microsoft.SharePoint.Library.SPRequestInternalClass.GetNTFullNamefromLoginEx(String bstrLogin, Boolean& pbIsDL)

Part of the call stack is shown below:

Microsoft_SharePoint!Microsoft.SharePoint.Library.SPRequest.GetNTFullNamefromLoginEx(System.String, Boolean ByRef)

Microsoft_SharePoint!Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities.SPUtility.GetFullNameFromLoginEx(System.String, Boolean ByRef)

Microsoft_SharePoint!Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPAce`1[[Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy.TaxonomyRights, Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy]].get_DisplayName()

Microsoft_SharePoint_Taxonomy!Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy.WebServices.TermStoreGenericObject..ctor(Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy.Group)

Microsoft_SharePoint_Taxonomy!Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy.WebServices.TaxonomyInternalService.GetGroups(System.Guid, System.Guid, System.Guid, Boolean, Int32)

To improve the performance for the term store administrators I recommend using an AD security group in the place of individuals names.

On page load only the AD group will be resolved in AD to ensure it exists, none of the group members will be resolved and should therefore reduce the number of name resolutions your page has to complete before loading its content.

I hope this post helps you understand more about this page and what happens on loading, as it took me long hours of investigation to get to the bottom of the performance issues I faced.

Thanks for reading,

Matt