Slow UI Response

First of all let me say as someone who does web development, your UI in incredible. I know some organizations that might be interested in the product, but I have a question about response time. I've noticed several actions (right clicks and others) have a slow response time. I've noticed that on my Mac and on a Windows machine. Obviously, it is tough to distinguish between what is slow because of the app and what is due to communication round trips, but I tested it on a Cable connection (5.0 download speeds) so I don't think it's the connection.

Anyway, given this is a beta release, should I expect that 1.0 release to be faster? I don't expect this to be perfect since it is the first thing we have seen and I was just wondering if there is some optimization going on that will make the end product quicker. I think it will need to be more responsive for me to convince some folks to leave their desktop Outlook client for this product full time.

Again, what you have done is very impressive, I'm not bashing just asking a difficult question. Keep up the good work.

Thank you for your post and your encouragement. We are continously working on improving the performance of the AJAX client. Among the areas we are working on is improving the way we handle network communications, improving the data caching model on the client, better balancing of lazy vs. pre-creation of commonly used UI components, and identifying and correcting hotspots in the code.

sclough, we're always looking to optmize! Can you give a little more info. on what browser you're using as well some machine specs? We've noticed IE is generally slower than FF but we're constantly trying to improve performance across the board.

BTW, you may also get an idea of delays in network communication vs. reaction to UI events (i.e. right clicks) by opening the debug window. Just enter "$set:debug #" (without quotes, where # = 1, 2, or 3 - where 3 is most verbose). All network requests and responses are spit out to the debug window.

Hope this helps.

by the way, you enter "$set:debug #" (where # equals 1-3, 3 being themost verbose), in the search query field at the top of the page. optionally you can slip it into the query string.

Thanks for the debug tip. I have tested on the following hardware:

700 Mhz iBook with 384 Mb RAM. Firefox 1.5 Beta.
2.0 Ghz P4 with 1 Gb RAM Windows XP, Firefox current version.

I have not tested IE yet. I'll try the debug also and see what that reveals. On a good note, I just tested it again on my iBook over a dial up connection and the performance was pretty decent for dial up.

Hi,

The UI is fantastic and is definitely what I am going to go with on our mailserver.

I do have a concern though.. The UI seems to be a *lot* slower than it should be. We're talking 2-4 seconds before I can see a response to clicks. The machine I am using is a P3 660MHz with 512MB RAM, WinXP/firefox.

While not the latest.. this machine suffices for browsing any other site. I do not see this same lag with any of the google sites (mail, maps) which also use AJAX.

I will test this again today on my home computer (dual athlon, 1Gig RAM, 1.5M/768k DSL, linux/firefox) to see if there is a drastic improvement.

Kannan

Quote:

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Originally Posted by wsk

Hi,

The UI is fantastic and is definitely what I am going to go with on our mailserver.

I do have a concern though.. The UI seems to be a *lot* slower than it should be. We're talking 2-4 seconds before I can see a response to clicks. The machine I am using is a P3 660MHz with 512MB RAM, WinXP/firefox.

While not the latest.. this machine suffices for browsing any other site. I do not see this same lag with any of the google sites (mail, maps) which also use AJAX.

I will test this again today on my home computer (dual athlon, 1Gig RAM, 1.5M/768k DSL, linux/firefox) to see if there is a drastic improvement.

Kannan

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Are you testing on a local install? Or on our hosted demo. Keep in mind our hosted demo is subject to some heavy usage spikes so not what I'd consider a realistic production enviorment. Thousands of user created/deleted is not a normal use case but needed if we want people to get a personal account to test/play with.

In general we are working on some performance imporvements so be sure to look for those in upcoming releases.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by KevinH

Are you testing on a local install? Or on our hosted demo. Keep in mind our hosted demo is subject to some heavy usage spikes so not what I'd consider a realistic production enviorment. Thousands of user created/deleted is not a normal use case but needed if we want people to get a personal account to test/play with.

In general we are working on some performance imporvements so be sure to look for those in upcoming releases.

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I'd been playing around with the hosted demo, and did suspect that heavy usage might be a factor. So I also tried it over the past few days at different times from the same machine at work (P3-660M, 512M, WinXP/firefox) and saw consistent laggy behaviour.

That being said however, when I try the hosted demo out again relatively late in the evenings on my home machine (dual Athlon, 1G, linux/firefox), it's sufficiently responsive.

So I still don't know whether to blame heavy traffic during daytime or the slower machine. This distinction is important to me because some people who access our mail server use even slower hardware than the rel well-maintained P3 above. (Right now Horde/IMP is the web client).

I will be installing zimbra on a new machine shortly, and should figure out where the bottleneck is. I will also try the demo from a coworker's faster machine for a bit during the daytime to see if that makes a diff. Till then.. just please keep the excellent work and perf enhancements coming.

Thanks very much!

Kannan

My home server is P4 2.4 and 1GB RAM using FC4, and then home client PC is P4 3.4 with 2GB RAM using WinXP, the speed is great! But my office PC only P3...speed not good when using IE, but good speed when using Firefox latest verison... :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Phantasmagoria

My home server is P4 2.4 and 1GB RAM using FC4, and then home client PC is P4 3.4 with 2GB RAM using WinXP, the speed is great! But my office PC only P3...speed not good when using IE, but good speed when using Firefox latest verison... :)

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Yes Firefox in general performs a bit better on our app. We are working on some perf improvements in the UI and those will start to show up in the next few releases.