SharePoint Farm Freezing, Becomes Unusable Without An IISReset - A Lesson In Item-Level Permissions
Recently I was working with a client who's SharePoint 2010 environment had been poorly managed for years. They had a single site collection on a single, large content database (650GB). Not uncommon, however this environment also occasionally froze up, never loading any of the pages on any sites until an IISRESET was performed on the Web Front End (WFE). It started off only happening once a month, then moved to once a week, a few times a week, to 5-10 times a day... Begin Troubleshooting: The issue was around too many lists, and items within those lists having their own permissions. Each permission for an item counts as one row in the RoleAssignment table in the database. apparently they say a healthy DB will only have 200,000 rows in that table. Ours had 10,000,000 rows (You can check this by right-clicking the Database in SQL Management Studio and clicking Reports > Disk Usage by Top Tables. Then look for the RoleAssignment Table). and every time someone went t