This article addresses performance challenges when indexing Sitecore profile data. Martin Davies discussed in a presentation how the TrackingField object in Sitecore performs excessive processing beyond indexing needs.

The Problem

The standard approach using TrackingField involves significant overhead:

TrackingField field = new TrackingField(i.Fields["__Tracking"]);
ContentProfile[] profiles = field.Profiles;

Davies suggested parsing XML directly would be faster, but didn’t provide implementation examples.

The Solution

I created a utility class called TrackingConverter that parses the tracking field’s XML directly. The XML structure contains profile elements with associated key-value pairs representing user profile data.

I built POCO classes (XdbProfile and XdbProfileKey) to structure the parsed data, allowing developers to extract and manipulate profile information efficiently.

Implementation

The solution integrates into a computed index field, replacing the TrackingField approach with direct XML parsing.

Performance Results

Method	Time to Index Master
TrackingField	68 seconds
XML parsing	46 seconds
Improvement	12 seconds

Note: This improvement was measured across just 4 items with profile data. The difference scales significantly with larger datasets.

This approach significantly improves indexing performance when working with Sitecore profile data.