The developer dashboard in SharePoint 2010 is the shiznit. It is so helpful in pin pointing things that are slowing down your pages. Lot's of time this is due to web parts which have been minimized but not closed, but sometimes it's something entirely unexpected. In any case used in the same way we use page tracing as developers. This is a farm wide setting so all pages and sites are affected. Although you can use PowerShell to turn it on and off prefer to use stsadm because it's less typing:
To turn it on all you have to do is go into the SharePoint Management Shell (the one that already has all the SharePoint stuff turned on basically as well as having direct access to the stsadm.exe program so you don't have to add an environment variable) Then type:
STSADM.exe -o setproperty -pn developer-dashboard -pv on
(by the way this is also fine:
stsadm -o setproperty -pn developer-dashboard -pv on
and -pn means property name and -pv means property value)
To turn it off (which you should do AS SOON AS YOU ARE DONE) this should not be left on.
You simply type:
STSADM.exe -o setproperty -pn developer-dashboard -pv off
If you want it to be available to on demand mode so that it can be toggled with an icon in the upper right of the page you can use:
STSADM.exe -o setproperty -pn developer-dashboard -pv ondemand
Then when you are done you can use the
STSADM.exe -o setproperty -pn developer-dashboard -pv off
To turn it off again.
Always test to make sure it's off!!!!!!!
