1. Don’t try and crawl the Internet, you will run out of disk space.
Don’t laugh. I did this accidentally which led to some of my other performance investigations once I managed to get some disk space back.
2. SQL Server is a memory hog. If this is installed on the same server as MOSS then on the properties of the server name, limit the maximum server memory used by SQL to about ½ the physical memory (it seems to default to 100% physical memory which causes an excessive amount of swapping)
3. Crawling overhead. MOSS provides 3 levels of throttling for the crawler.
From Central Administration > Operations > Services on Server > Office SharePoint Server Search Service Settings , Select “Reduced” Indexer Performance. This is important if you are going to drag and drop thousands of documents into a document library via the Explorer interface.
4. Content Database size (especially if you are going to drag and drop thousands of documents into SharePoint). Extend your content database to a decent size to cope with content you plan on storing in it. SQL Server 2005 seems to be faster at extending the DB than 2000 but if you check the defaults on your DB you will find that it starts at 10Mb and extends 1Mb at a time. SqharePoint content DB’s are not like traditional transaction databases, if they are storing documents, the transactions are MUCH bigger than normal.
5. Transaction Logs. Set your recovery mode to simple or you may run out of disk space if you don’t do regular backups which is the only thing that will truncate the log. Especially important before doing a restore from stsadm or Central Admin restore.
6. Don’t use virtualization. SharePoint is not a single exe, there is a lot going on, especially if you enable every feature (WSS, Forms Server, Excel Services, Document Conversion, Indexing, Searching, Job Server, Single sign-on, BDC, Web Services etc).
Any more tips to add to the list?