Colin Phillips (Alumni)
There’s a useful PowerShell script out there which is designed to iterate over all your SharePoint Web Applications and “warm them up”. But what happens when you find that there are other pages within your site that should be warmed up, and that script isn’t cutting it for you? Well, it turns out there’s a very easy to install and use farm based solution out there on CodePlex called (simply) SharePoint.WarmUp. It’s goal is to allow you to specify particular URLs that you want warmed up. The idea being that you could pre-heat your search landing and results pages, the root page of every site collection, or any other hot spots of traffic throughout your site.
I personally like this tool as it doesn’t require any kind of custom code, the configuration and usage is obvious, and it uses very standard SharePoint mechanisms. It’s also almost entirely self-contained within Central Admin, which is nice in that it’s a central location for its entire configuration.
There are a couple of gotcha’s presently in that (at the time of writing) there is only a SharePoint 2010 version available. In addition, being a farm solution, it will require a restart of your IIS (on each server) before it’ll start working properly.
The documentation on the CodePlex site is quite good (for installation, configuration, and usage), so I’m not going to really try and cover that in my writing, just go to the site, and take a look for yourself.