Simple Performance Tuning and Sitecore Counters – Sitecore Best Practices

A quick refresher on one of Sitecore’s long-standing performance recommendations — and one that is easy to overlook, especially on new installs.

Disable Memory Monitoring and Performance Counters (unless you need them)

Out of the box, Sitecore ships with Memory Monitoring hooks and Performance Counters enabled. Sitecore’s own recommendation has long been to disable these in production unless you have a specific need for them, as they add overhead that can affect throughput under load.

To disable Memory Monitoring, locate and patch the Sitecore.config (or the relevant include config) and set:

<setting name="MemoryMonitor.CheckMemory" value="false" />

Performance Counters can be disabled by removing or commenting out the Sitecore.PerformanceCounters.config include file, or patching it out via a config patch.

When you do need Sitecore Performance Counters

If you want to use Sitecore’s built-in Windows Performance Counters for monitoring (e.g. via PerfMon), you need to register them first. From an elevated command prompt on the server, run:

%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\installutil.exe "[path]\Sitecore.Client.dll"

This registers the Sitecore performance counter categories with Windows. Without this step the counters simply won’t appear in PerfMon, and Sitecore may log errors on startup.

The key takeaway: keep these features disabled by default and only enable them intentionally, in environments where you have the monitoring infrastructure to actually consume the data they produce.