End Your If

Quite often we get a complaint from a client that their homepage is too slow.  The first thing we do is load the homepage up and see for ourselves.  Yep, it looks slow, so the next step is too see what is being done.  Quite often you’ll see some random data being displayed on the homepage.  Whether it’s random news articles, photos, videos, etc…If this is not the case, you may find my article on improving slow loading web pages more useful.

If the homepage is slow because of random data, you can lay a bet with high certainty that those 10 random articles are being pulled with an ORDER BY RAND() OR NEWID() slowing the site to a crawl.  In case you are curious the difference, RAND() is the MySQL way and NEWID() is the SQL Server way.  In this article, I’ll show you why you should avoid these functions and several different solutions to help you overcome this issue. More »