We recently replaced a Site Server 3.0 site with Commerce Server 2002.  Let me step back a minute.  The sites don't really use the the server packages as intended.  They use the pipelining process and the order form object model and that's about it, so we really miss out on a lot of opportunities here to leverage some of the cooler features of CS2002.  However, the process of moving from one platform to another was relatively painless compared to the effort of moving a site that had bought into Site Server completely.  The site is old, as in "from about mid-2000", so the architecture was around long before I started here and certainly long before I was in my present, decision-making role.

Anyway, that's where we are.  And we're noticing that the Commerce Server 2002 objects are orders of magnitude slower than the Site Server objects.  It would be nice to be able to "unroll" those objects and create pure SQL tables out of them rather than leaving all the data in the marshalled baskets, however no one is willing to pay for that effort as it would be a significant amount of work (yes, the developer in me definitely wants to take the time to do it right.  However, the director of technology in me doesn't really want to tie up my resources on this project for 3 months.  Funny how things change as you move up the ladder.  A few years ago, I would have said that my DOT was a dumkopf for not taking the time to do things the best way possible.  I'd like to take this time to apologize to all the tech leads and project managers that I've fought with over the past few years.)

Throughout most of the site, this isn't a problem, but there are two places (in administrative pages) on the site where 100 or more of these marshalled baskets get retreived and opened, and these pages are taking minutes longer to load than they were previously.  I don't expect that anyone has ever learned anything about this, I just wanted to have documented it somewhere.