ESS MSS Performance

Dear Experts,

We have ESS/MSS Portal configured on ECC 5.0, EP6, Windows 2003 environment. Our users are experiencing performance issues accessing ESS or MSS Portal. Accessing the initial ESS/MSS page is slow etc. We have checked CPU and memory utilization and it looks good.

What is the best way to configure ESS/MSS Portal on EP6, ECC 5.0? We have our ESS/MSS on our HR Backend system (Java + ABAP) and business component for ESS/MSS on EP6 (Java Only). What is the best practice for setting up ESS/MSS with EP6? Should we move our ESS/MSS from HR backend to Portal Server? Is there any configuration we should look at?

Thanks in advance for your help.