If you’re running Sharepoint, I can bet if you try using it in the morning, it takes a good while before the page initially loads up. Then for the rest of the day, every page you hit is lightning fast. This is because the IIS application pool for Sharepoint resets at night between 1AM – 2 AM (right click on the application pool in IIS and check the Recycling tab for the exact time on your server). When you access the page for the first time in the morning, IIS has to wait for the application pool to “warm up” and rebuild the cache before it presents the page to you.
I had been using the scripts that Joel Oleson (Former Sr. Technical Product Manager for SharePoint at Microsoft & current Sharepoint Evangelist) made available on his blog back in 2006 for the longest time:
http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2006/08/13/697044.aspx
Since then, a tool called SPWakeUp has been created inspired from these scripts and I have been using this on all my Sharepoint and Project front end servers instead. It is maintained at CodePlex here:
http://www.codeplex.com/SPWakeUp
Just follow the instructions and set it up as a scheduled task to run on your web front ends after the app pool recycles at night. I created a .bat file containing the following arguments that the scheduled task is pointed at:
C:\SPWakeUp\SPWakeUp.exe -discover -log:c:\SPWakeUp\log.txt
This will automatically discover all your Sharepoint sites (which is the default behavior of the tool anyway) and also log the results to a text file. This will eliminate the slow loading in the mornings of MOSS, WSS, PWA, etc.
