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General Workfront Performance Issues - Is this a concern to your users?

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Level 7
My biggest issue is the general performance of the system. This is something we've seen some consistent issues with for the last two years. I feel that general performance is more important than any new features - performance is king and it powers all the current features and any new features. I put an item into the Idea Exchange to make sure this is on the list. If you're experiencing some of these general issues, please upvote and add your particular issues to the list. The goal is to make this very clear and transparent to Workfront that there is still some work to be done with general performance - not just troubleshooting the large spikes in performance & outages. "https://support.workfront.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115005979987-Performance-Overall-WF-System-Performance-Improvements">https://support.workfront.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115005979987-Performance-Overall-WF-System-Pe... My company is on Cluster 1. How about you folks? Change takes time, patience and practice.
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Level 10
Agree 100% on performance issues with Workfront. We are located on the CL01 grid and there are constant issues that disrupt fluidity. I'm starting to receive concerns from other areas within my unit. It's an older grid I hope they replace soon.

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Level 7
Thanks for the reply! We're on cluster 1 too. I actually added that to the post and asked for any other folks to chime in on where they're located too. I'm curious if this is a universal thing or specific to our cluster. Change takes time, patience and practice.

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Level 10
Check this link out: https://trust.workfront.com/?status It's usually CL01 that has been having the issues; I haven't noticed the others.

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Level 3
We are on cluster 1 too and have been experiencing performance issue from last 2 years. This is a big concern and pain point for our users.

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Level 9
Same boat errr cluster as everyone here it seems -- CL01 for us is extremely peaky. Performance is the biggest concern.

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Level 10
Same here. Cluster 1… Michael Lebowitz Marketing Analyst Michael.Lebowitz@guidewellconnect.com< T 904-436-4240 | M 904-200-1364 Fax 904-565-6156 4800 Deerwood Campus Pkwy DCC 800-4-272 Jacksonville, FL 32246

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Level 10
I would be curious to know what triggers a change in what we see for CL01 on the trust website. We've experienced issues that my network team validated were on the WorkFront network hardware, I opened a ticket, but the trust website was never updated. Does anyone know what triggers a change in the Trust website? Thanks, Eric

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Level 9
same here again -- the Trust site is very slick and cool. But not to sound corny - I don't trust, Trust.

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Level 10
We spoke with our customer representative and I would recommend other company users within CL01 do the same. Maybe they can fix the server (or whatever) much sooner.

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Level 7
Agreed. I was in a session at Leap that was meant to speak to performance issues and what’s coming in the future to resolve them. The group in that session was very vocal about these general performance issues - it’s the day to day slowness that’s not being addressed and needs some signal boosting. We arrived at the following. · Anyone with these issues should talk to their CSM and ask for status updates on what’s being done. Do it on each call to keep it top of mind. · At Leap, talk to the product group and make this request known. Make it clear performance speed is as important as features, if not more so. · On the idea exchange, upvote the idea for tackling general performance<"https://support.workfront.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115005979987-Performance-Overall-WF-System-Performance-Improvements>" https://support.workfront.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115005979987-Performance-Overall-WF-System-Performance-Improvements> and add any supporting comments to it. I think the last one in particular will help make this as public as possible so folks who are experiencing the same problems realize it’s a trend and can help WF understand how important this is to us. To be honest, I love the system but I feel like I’m beating a dead horse on this topic. This is the third Leap conference I’ve been to where this has been a topic we’ve wanted to get some traction on. And here we still are.

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Level 7
Interesting information - apparently there's an article about upcoming performance improvements on the help site. I've pulled a quote from another customer who was given this information with the link to that article (noted below). The article itself is not actually that helpful. It basically states the same exact message we heard at LEAP 2016. The wording in the article is very similar to the promises we received from Steve ZoBell at LEAP 2016 when we had a conversation with him about this same topic. Here we are having just left LEAP 2017 and it's the same message that was handed out in a private session on the same topic. I wish this article had some dates associated with it - when it was posted & when it was last updated. I understand that concrete dates for these improvements aren't necessarily possible but not even attempting to put some tentative timing to where in the roadmap they're hoping to address some of this is pretty frustrating. Heather Rehm-Stelter Yesterday at 15:29 Recently, the Workfront Customer Care team asked that we authorize them to close out our performance related tickets (each of the items highlighted above). As an alternative of tracking and monitoring resolution of the problem rather than through their ticketing tool, they asked us to check the page below for updates. Didn't hear much talked about this topic during LEAP (general sessions or breakout sessions), but I am hopeful that this will get resolved soon. Upcoming Performance Improvements: https://support.workfront.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003544908-Upcoming-Performance-Improvements Change takes time, patience and practice.

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Level 4
Interesting post. I think the main thing, however, that I take from it is what I have been speculating on for a while now which is this is not a capacity issue. If it was, they would simply throw more servers at it and it would go away. The issue is an architecture problem and I wouldn't be surprised if the things that make Workfront great aren't the same things that cause the performance issues. As a result, they can't just "remove" the performance issue, they have to re-architect the core of the system. Not something easy to do or devote a lot of time to while still releasing new features. Tech debt in action.

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Level 10
Hi: I’m not convinced it is an architecture issue. Most of the time, WorkFront screams right along. Some times, it is a performance dog. The architecture does not change, so I’m not sure it can cause the variation. I am of the opinion that the issue relates to the database being too busy or the web servers at the front end. Sometimes it was a code problem, I think, that they had recently implemented. I believe there is far more underlying this issue than we know. Thanks! Eric

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Level 10
We noticed that there are packets getting dropped between us and Workfront. All I can do is ask our IT do ensure it’s not a firewall issue and if not, engage our ISP to troubleshoot the path. It is probably not the answer to all the issues but should be considered as one of many. Michael Lebowitz Marketing Analyst Michael.Lebowitz@guidewellconnect.com< T 904-436-4240 | M 904-200-1364 Fax 904-565-6156 4800 Deerwood Campus Pkwy DCC 800-4-272 Jacksonville, FL 32246

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Level 9
I upvoted and commented on the Idea Exchange item, but also wanted to share here: We also have ongoing performance issues, however, our seem to be related to our corporate proxy server. No matter what we do, we can't seem to clear this up. The performance difference is clear when doing a training or other activity via webex that is completely off our network. We would LOVE to hear from other organizations who may have resolved the firewall issues (without whitelisting fully - we are healthcare and cannot do that). Thanks!

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Level 10
Hi Alison. One of our clients had sporadic periods of extremely poor performance, which Workfront, AtAppStore, and the client's networking experts investigated exhaustively for a number of weeks. In the end, it turned out that the client's network was served by two different Internet Service Providers (A and B), with the proxy server routing traffic to whichever provider it decided was running best at any given point in time. That, however, tripped up Workfront (as I understand it), since requests that came "in on A" then went "out on B". Once this was diagnosed, the client's network team forced network affinity for Workfront (e.g. "A only"): the sporadic periods of extremely poor performance went away immediately, and have not reoccurred, suggesting that the switching action was the root cause. Perhaps the same is true in your case. Regards, Doug

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Level 10
Doug - That is interesting. Our experience has been that we get really good turnaround times on each hop to WorkFront, then the replies from WorkFront take forever. I do a TRACERT to the WorkFront servers and using that, have shown WorkFront that it isn’t our network that is performing slowly. It doesn’t happen much, for sure, but a simple TRACERT tells me where the problem is. Thanks! Eric

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Level 9
Thanks Doug, interesting scenario - I will check it out!

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Level 1
Hello everyone, My name is Bryan Pino. I am the VP of Engineering at Workfront. I have been reviewing this thread and wanted to provide some updates on what we’re doing related to performance, what you can expect and also to just further the conversation to provide you more information and to help us determine how best to execute both short-term and long-term. First, thank you to everyone here for utilizing the community site to voice your concerns and also for creating the request on the Idea Exchange and encouraging the community to vote it up. That is what the Community forum and the Idea Exchange are for so I am glad to see the engagement from you - you can expect we’ll reciprocate that with engagement of our own. With regard to what we’re doing with performance specifically, the answer is quite a lot. As this thread alludes to multiple times, however, there are multiple needs to “fix performance” and solving for any one item may or may not have the same impact on each customer. Restated, there are many levels to what we’re doing here meaning improvements to performance will come in iterative phases. But we are definitely committed to the effort and to delivering a holistic solution to across the board. To that end, over the past two months, we created an ad-hoc team of developers to take a deep dive into the application with two goals: Finding specific items related to performance and implementing fixes for release in the short-term. Identifying the architectural (or broad application-level) areas that would benefit the customer performance experience the most when addressed I will provide more specific details on the results of that work in a separate post today, the point here is to quickly summarize what it is we are doing right now to make both short- and long-term improvements to performance. The thing I want to make very clear here, though, is that we have and will continue to focus efforts on solving this problem for our customers. Once I get my next post out with more specific information, I welcome your questions and feedback as I want to make sure the work we’re doing is first understood by all of you and second moving us toward making the systemic improvements it is clear everyone here is looking for. Thanks, Bryan Pino

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Level 9
Two Thumbs up! In Reply to Bryan Pino:
Hello everyone, My name is Bryan Pino. I am the VP of Engineering at Workfront. I have been reviewing this thread and wanted to provide some updates on what we’re doing related to performance, what you can expect and also to just further the conversation to provide you more information and to help us determine how best to execute both short-term and long-term. First, thank you to everyone here for utilizing the community site to voice your concerns and also for creating the request on the Idea Exchange and encouraging the community to vote it up. That is what the Community forum and the Idea Exchange are for so I am glad to see the engagement from you - you can expect we’ll reciprocate that with engagement of our own. ... Thanks, Bryan Pino