SharePoint 2013 site Slowness issue

I was about to give up on one of my labb SharePoint 2013 Environments because it was so extremely slow all the time.
Warmup scripts, reloads, more memory, more CPU, stopping services, stopping search…nothing helped.

I had a constant loadtime of all aspx pages of 6+ seconds, 6.10-6.20 something. Even when the page was just loaded and I pressed F5 to reload, it still took 6.10 seconds.
This was an environment that gave you sensitive nerves…

So, after looking for any solution or more like looking for the little issue that caused this all day, I gave up more or less.
– CPU was at a maximum 40% on SQL, SharePoint cranked it up to 18%…
– Memory consumtion was at 25% of the 12GB SharePoint had…
– SQL was Lightning fast to all other SharePoint farms…
– Network utilization showed about 100Kbps at the most…

I scavenged the internet as usual and found nothing but the standard: add more memeory, add more CPU, stop services, stop search…
None of that helped and I had tried it all…

Then…when all hope was lost, I got on a call with my excellent SharePoint buddy Mattias Gutke, we talked about the issue, his server on a laptop with SSD disks showed 50-100ms loadtime of all pages, reload did nopt even produce a flicker…
Then as often happens, we came to discuss the Distributed cache service, what it did and why it was there and so on…I had already had a look at it but could not find any reason why a default cache would give me this lousy performance. Then, I had a look at the timestamp in the F12 Developer dashbord – Network tab – Start capturing. I saw the home.aspx load and it took the usual 6.10 seconds.
The timestamp could be found in the detailed view and on the response header.
I memorized the timestamp (that was in GMT timezone) and opened up my ULS log. In the log at the exact time of the response header, I saw errors from the distributed cache.

I decided that t-shooting the distributed cache would have to wait, it was getting late…but, before disconnecting the Lync call with Mattias, we decided to try and see just what would happen if I stopped the distributed cache service and loaded the page.
Said and done:

Now, loaded the same site:

Whit the Distributed cache service running:

Notice any difference? Now my SharePoint farm is Lightning fast!!! From 6.10 seconds down to 79 ms!

Why is this so then you ask? No idea, something misconfigured or perhaps this is standard when using a single SharePoint server…anyway, today I don’t care.
Stop the service and the performance is great!

Hope this may help you as it did me!