Since much of SharePoint Server's activity is storing or retrieving data from SQL Server, most performance troubleshooting and improvement tasks will rely on troubleshooting the underlying SQL environment.
Core recommendations for improving the performance of a SharePoint farm include the following:
- Ensuring an appropriate amount of frontend and distributed cache servers are deployed with adequate amounts of memory
- Validating the storage architecture for SQL is adequate for the number of read/write IOPS
- Validating all servers in the farm have adequate memory configurations using system performance monitoring for memory utilization and memory paging operations
For detailed recommendations on configuring SharePoint and SQL for best performance, see Chapter 2, Planning a SharePoint Farm.