This entry is about a two week battle I had to get a production Orchard CMS site able to handle a load of about 3,500 unique users a day and 250,000 hits a day. Originally, the site only had a few visitors a day and was built on Orchard 1.4. with a SQL Compact backend. The site itself has many content items and content types being pulled in on each page so there was a lot of database activity. Site traffic began to increase slowly and I first noticed the production issues when pages began taking more than 5 seconds to load and the CMS itself was taking upwards of 5 minutes to start-up from a cold start. The site was being pinned down by users hitting the site while the pages loaded and every page load was taking a long time to cycle back information from the database with each hit.