Slow system performance - how to troubleshoot

[KeeganWa]

Hi, Wondering what troubleshooting steps System Admins use when users complain about the system being slow? Thanks! Keegan Walker

[VicAl]

Workfront has a Status page you can check. But frankly I never look at it because it doesn't seem to be accurate all the time. Typically I do the following: Poke around myself to see what I'm personally seeing as a response time. If I experience the same thing, I call WF. If I'm not experiencing slowness, I make sure my User is using Chrome. WF recommends Chrome and I've personally seen IE and Edge behave slowly with WF. Could be something with our environment, but I've absolutely seen the difference. After that I would have to go see exactly what they're doing and what's happening to debug further. In fact, anytime a user sees something wonky that I don't see on my own machine, I ask if they're using Chrome. "60% of the time it works every time." ��

[TreyRo]

We have had this issue for SO LONG. Users will complain about system slowness and Workfront will counter with "Have the users been filtering the data to limit the number of results showing on a page?" According to them, when Workfront has to load alot of data onto a single view it takes a while. I would challenge this sentiment because I've personally seen where a page with less than 100 records took about 2 minutes to load. Internet speed wasn't an issue in that scernario either. Not sure what exactly causes this slowness but I do agree it can get kind of annoying. Trey Rogers

[AnthonyPernice]

I agree that there are times where WF seems to slow to a crawl (ex- yesterday when I was adding a single user). There are a few things users can do to mitigate that at least a bit. Use Chrome, as others have mentioned, limit the number of open tabs and applications (especially when using proof). This isn't foolproof, but it can help at times. Anthony Pernice Healthcare Consultancy Group

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Investigating web based performance is tricky business. I can offer two suggestions: reality check: take your laptop to a coffee shop and try Workfront over a public internet. If it's better performance than it was in your office, odds are it is related to your corporate network get your hands dirty: do some reasearch (or ask your IT team to do so) about "ping" and "trace route", and monitor the network interactions between your laptop and Workfront from within your office. At one of our clients a few years ago, by doing so we discovered that their redundant (two internet service providers) internet backbone - which is normally a good thing - was in fact causing the poor performance because of the way Workfront treated requests from what it perceived as different IP requests (eg more re-authenticating, less caching, etc). The solution was to restrict all Workfront traffic to just one of the ISP's: as soon as we did, performance dramatically improved (eg 10x), and has been stable ever since. If anyone's geeky enough to want more details on the (awesome, free) diagnostic tool we used to do this, I'd be happy to provide more details. Regards, Doug Doug Den Hoed - AtAppStore Got Skills? Lend a hand! I https://community.workfront.com/participate/unanswered-threads

[MichaelLe]

I have seen two causes to why we experience slow performance. Our IT department is always making adjustments to our Proxy server and firewall. Anytime I see slow performance they are the first ones I check with. If that doesn't solve the problem then I use Doug's "Reality Check". When that seems to show a difference then what I have found is that cause is much harder to fix. I run traces to the Workfront servers and find that we lose high amounts of packets along the way. In order to fix this you have to engage your ISP, which has to then engage the next ISP in line and so on. That situation has never been resolved in 4 years. Now I do agree when you try to load more than 500 records on a view it takes a bit and that might be an architecture issue with how Workfront builds the tables. Michael Lebowitz GuideWell Connect