Speed Issues when viewing in Staging or Development Mode

When you are view a site locally (Development Mode) or in Preview/Staging mode, the content of the site needs to be pulled down from the Agility Content Server on demand - it's not part of the content sync process - that's only for Published content.

There are a few reasons why this could be slowing you down:

1. The website application is being rebuilt from multiple deployments.
   • This is the most common reason that a staging or development mode site can feel slow.  If you are changing code, rebuilding templates, or otherwise doing deployments on a given web server or local machine, the site may be slow to load. 
   • If the problem goes away after loading a couple of different pages on the site, it's probably this issue.
2. The content needs to be downloaded for the first time.
   • Agility uses a "delta" mechanism to download and cache content in staging mode.  The first you hit a website in staging mode on a new server or local machine, it may have to pull down quite a lot of content.  
   • Once you load a few different pages, this problem should ease off.
   • If you make a lot of content changes on a site, it may take some time for the web server to pull down those changes on demand.
3. There are a lot of people testing a site in Staging mode.
   • This tends to happen when folks are getting ready for a big launch.  Lots of people are on there making content changes, code changes, and previewing what things are going to look like. If you are a load balanced server, each server needs may need to download its own copy of the content, which can slow things down initially as well.
   • Since the content server is being "pinged" on every page load of the site, this can cause slowdowns in staging mode.
4. There's a Volatile Resource being consumed that is not being cached.
   1. If you have a database, web service or other volatile resources that you are accessing, you may not be caching that data if the site is in Staging or Development mode, or you staging / local server may not have enough memory to keep that data in the cache.  This is a good place to have some trace logging in your code to try and identify slow dependencies with a tool such as Application Insights.