Hi Daniel,

The first thing that stands out as a possible issue is the use of Descendants. This will touch every node under your start node and is flagged as a "code smell". In this help document: https://our.umbraco.org/documentation/Reference/Common-Pitfalls/

It talks about how it can be an issue. By the sounds of it, it looks like this is probably going to be a bit of an issue for your news section.

You could also try adding a filter to only get news items from the last 6 months initially. Then if there aren't 15 for you to take, retrieve more.

Nik

Hi Daniel

Also, I think caching is the way to solve performance issue for you, I think you don't need to do a query on each request, so try to use CachedPartial -

https://our.umbraco.org/documentation/reference/templating/mvc/partial-views#caching

Thanks

Alex

Hi Daniel,

We had a very similar issue on a site and we solved this by using a xpath navigator : https://our.umbraco.org/documentation/Reference/Common-Pitfalls/#xpathnodeiterator-for-when-you-need-direct-xml-support

I think this example should get you started :

// xpath query that get's all visible new list articles
var xpathQuery = "id(2873)[@isDoc]//Newlistsarticle[umbracoNaviHide=0]";

 // create a xpath navigator to retreive the news items in the fastest way
var navigator = UmbracoContext.Current.ContentCache.GetXPathNavigator().Select(xpathQuery).Cast<XPathNavigator>().ToList();

// list with items to display
var newsList = new List<IPublishedContent>();

 // sort the items by date and take the 15 last one
foreach (var item in navigator.OrderByDescending(
               x =>
                    {
                        var dateProp = x.SelectSingleNode("newsDate").Value;

                        var attemptDate = dateProp.TryConvertTo<DateTime>();

                        if (attemptDate.Success)
                        {
                            return attemptDate.Result;
                        }
                    // if we can't parse news date use create date
                    var createDate = DateTime.Parse(x.GetAttribute("createDate", ""), CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);

                    return createDate;
                }).Take(15))
        {
            var id = int.Parse(item.GetAttribute("id", ""));

            var content = UmbracoContext.Current.ContentCache.GetById(id);

            newsList.Add(content);
        }

I think you can remove the casts, as you should be able to just do:

var listOfTop15News = newsRootNode.Descendants("Newlistsarticle").Where(x => x.IsVisible() &&
    (x.GetPropertyValue<DateTime>("newsDate")) <= DateTime.Now).OrderByDescending(x => x.GetPropertyValue<DateTime>("newsDate")).Take(15);

But caching is the key to performance. I'd definitely used an Html.CachedPartial to cache the generated HTML, as Alex suggests.

If, for some reason you can't used a cached-partial (or editors are updating news a lot) then you can also cache the query results. It's a bit more complicated, but you store the results of the query in Umbraco's run-time cache as explained here -> https://our.umbraco.org/Documentation/Reference/Cache/updating-cache

So this would be something like:

Func<IEnumerable<IPublishedContent>> listOfTop15News = () => newsRootNode.Descendants("Newlistsarticle").Where(x => x.IsVisible() && 
(x.GetPropertyValue<DateTime>("newsDate")) <= DateTime.Now).
OrderByDescending(x => x.GetPropertyValue<DateTime>("newsDate")).Take(15).ToList();

var latestNews = ApplicationContext.ApplicationCache.RuntimeCache.GetCacheItem<IEnumerable<IPublishedContent>>("ListOfTop15News", listOfTop15News, TimeSpan.FromHours(1));

This caches the results of the query for an hour into the variable latestNews (but you can change the value by altering the timespan).

Remember to add using Umbraco.Core.Cache to your page / class file.

Hi Daniel,

I see a lot of suggestions about caching here...but IMHO you should make the initial query fast.

You can do it with the xpath navigator example as described in my previous post or by using Examine as described in this article : http://skrift.io/articles/archive/testing-the-performance-of-querying-umbraco/

After that you can still apply caching to not run the same query on every request to the page.

Dave

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