If you’re an avid Sitecore developer, you’ll quickly realize that the initial load times for Sitecore 8 are a bit longer than in previous versions of Sitecore. This is primarily due to a new addition to Sitecore’s “initialize” pipeline, namely “PrecompileSpeakViews”. As the name suggests, this processor essentially goes through all of the SPEAK views and dialogs and precompiles them, so that they load up faster when requested. That’s great for an end-user of Sitecore, but is a little cumbersome for developers, especially considering that you have to go through the wait every time you compile your code (because the application pool has to recycle every time you compile).

Of course, with all the great configuration power of Sitecore, all is not lost. You can simply comment out the processor from the appropriate configuration files. The side-effect of doing this is that you now have to wait slightly longer for the SPEAK views and dialogs to load when you first request them. A happy compromise for development purposes in my opinion. You’ll find the processor in two configuration files:

  • App_Config\Include\Sitecore.Speak.config
  • App_Config\Include\ContentTesting\Sitecore.ContentTesting.config

The processor configuration looks like this:

<processor type="Sitecore.Pipelines.Initialize.PrecompileSpeakViews, Sitecore.Speak.Client">
  …
</processor>

Happy faster Sitecore 8 coding!