Degraded system performance in Workfront

[JohnJOSullivan]

I'm curious to hear if other customers are experiencing increased latency and instability issues with Workfront. Besides pages taking forever to load, last week's update was a mild nightmare for us.

On Wednesday, we had scores of users submit tickets that they were unable to view proofs. Zapping cache and cookies did the trick, but it meant that the few of us admins wasted hours of our lives explaining to users how to zap cache and cookies for all time.

On Thursday after the update, the document form area was not working correctly for many users (myself included). On a positive side, the document forms now resemble every other form in Workfront. On the negative side, load times have been inconsistent. I've had instances where document forms won't load for 5-10 minutes. Zapping cache and cookies or trying different browsers didn't matter. This extended throughout the day on Friday, with additional tickets being submitted by users that "Workfront is broken."

There was the reported issue where dashboards weren't loading on the Requests page post-update. Fortunately that was fixed within a reasonable period of time. But it was another thing which occurred post-update. 

Even right now, I'm trying to do work on the Monday after the update. Forms still take a long time to load. (I have a tab open where a form still hasn't loaded five minutes after I attempted opening it.) Having to tell users to continually trying refreshing their screens or zapping their cache/cookies/etc. is not just annoying--it's not consistently working.

I'll be honest: Right now, I feel as if I have a really ugly baby and I'm trying to convince everyone that my baby isn't ugly--even though it's patently obvious that the baby is hideous. Supporting Workfront last week was a nightmare and I don't feel as if it's going to improve this week. I want to project confidence in the solidity of the system, but I'll be honest--I don't believe it myself.

Are other customers having similar problems? It cannot just be us. 

[KellieGardner · Accepted solution]

We have tons of issues with latency that I bring up to Workfront Support regularly and it's always just "that's how it's intended to work" responses.

When I try to load the reports page of my instance (as an admin) it takes almost a full minute to load, other pages average around 10 seconds if they even load at all and I find myself refreshing multiple times a day just to try and get other pages to load. I even have my browser said to clear cache and cookies when I close my browser out so it does it daily and still have issues.

It's definitely gotten worse over the years that I've been using Workfront.

[JohnJOSullivan]

It's not just Workfront proper. Fusion has also been laggy--especially when dealing with calls to the Proof API. I have timed scenarios which just stop processing "just because." So then, I have to go, clone the scenario, run that scenario, attempt to force quit the zombified scenario, wait, try again, wait, try again, etc. When I bring it up, I usually get told that I'm the only person reporting anything slow or wrong with Fusion and that it's probably my Scenarios.

I feel like I'm being continually gaslit by a software company.

[KellieGardner]

Yes Fusion is an issue too.

Luckly, my main issues are when trying to manually run a scenario that isn't on a timed schedule and that was solved through My IT helpdesk, as there was something being blocked on our end. Since then it's a little better but we don't have a ton of stuff running there. 

[KellieGardner]

@JohnJOSullivan  I was told by my sales rep to put in tickets every time I have issues that way there is some kind of log on their end about it. I gave up last year when it became too time consuming to manage the tickets with support just for them to tell me, it's not them, it's me.

[JohnJOSullivan]

I was told that it was due to the size of our scenarios, which is nonsense. I've had issues with two-module scenarios and our more complex Workfront/Workfront Proof integrations. Now that the Search module is significantly smaller, I've been swapping them into larger scenarios to decrease overall footprint and I'm still experiencing the same problems. 

[VictoriaLinn]

I'm glad to know I'm not the only one with the Reports section taking a long time to load! I started to notice the latency when we got to thousands of reports (which happens fast), when the number was less the load time wasn't significant. 

[KellieGardner]

We have a lot of reports which I've tried to cut down on but like you the number gets high really quick.

[skyehansen]

Something I've noticed recently about my own system is that Adobe Experience League and Workfront both are loading pretty slowly on Chrome. It's gotten to the point where if I don't get immediate results I immediately pull up Firefox to check and... sure enough, it's Chrome, because they load lightning fast in Firefox. 

Specifically regarding last week's update, I think that one was a bit rockier than normal. We noticed and submitted a couple of bugs. We don't use document forms a lot so of course haven't noticed anything going on there. 

[JohnJOSullivan]

Most of the users of our system use custom forms. A few complained that they didn't understand the new interface, but they got it shortly afterward. Some just didn't load for a while. Lots of tickets. I was going to take Friday off but we had so many support tix that I needed Friday so I could just get my normal Fusion development stuff done.

For the record, I'm overjoyed that the doc forms are now in the "new" experience. It's something that I've wanted for over two years now. But last week was soul crushing.

[ConnorO2]

Hey John! 

Just curious to see if you have seen any improvements over the past month? 

I've dealt with similar issues since the new updates have been coming out over the past few months. 

Doesn't sound like submitting a support ticket is worth my time if we are going to get responses like "that's how it's intended to work." 

We just renewed our contract for another year as well which I'm not to excited for if we continue to have problems like this.