<p>Professional Healthcare Resources, a home healthcare and hospice company based in Annandale, Va., had been running SharePoint since December 2007. At first, PHR used the collaboration system to house contact lists, weather information and office announcements. But the platform soon saw increased activity: Human resources began storing most of its forms and documents on SharePoint, while IT launched a help desk ticketing system.</p><p>As the amount of content grew, employees bumped up against performance issues. Users searching for data on SharePoint reported wait times of one minute or longer. "It became very slow," notes Hussein Sh-Ibrahim, director of IT at PHR. "I had to find where the bottleneck was coming from."</p><p>PHR's experience is not uncommon. SharePoint installations may start life as workgroup systems, but they typically don't stay that way. Other departments find new ways to take advantage of the system. The number of users grows, the data housed in SharePoint expands and performance often suffers. That's a particularly worrisome development for business-critical deployments.</p><p>Glacial search times aren't the only consideration for expanding SharePoint systems. Other growing pains include slow document upload and download times, long backup windows, and latency headaches for remote users.</p><p><a href="http://www.cio.com/article/731093/How_to_Overcome_SharePoint_Performance_Headaches">Keep reading...</a></p>