I recently discovered a problem on a client’s site whereby it was taking a long time to login to the CMS. They had Active Directory integration enabled but we were able to rule that out as being the cause of the slowness by temporarily disabling it.
We also investigated the possibility that there may have been some plug-ins / extensions running that could be performing some kind of background task and slowing it down. However this was not the case either. The problem did turn out to be related to plug-ins though…
Remember that from v8.0 Ektron introduced Extensions to replace the older plug-in technology. Plug-ins and Extensions allow you to write code modules that execute code following on from events that occur within the CMS. Such an event might be related to creating a user or deleting a content item.
There is a setting in the Ektron web.config file that turns the old plug-ins on or off:
<add key="ek_extensionServiceEnabled" value="true"/>
If you are on version 8.0 or greater then this setting should always be “false”. Unbeknownst to me at the time, adding new content items was also running slowly. This was also due to this setting being set at “true”. Basically, the Ektron was looking for the old plug-ins and waiting for a set amount of time before giving up – hence the delay.
Setting this to “false” suddenly made adding content and logging in users much faster!
Ektron CMS hints & tips 