Forum Discussion
MTC is getting ridiculously slow
Community Manager
I am deeply disappointed to hear your having such a negative experience with the Microsoft Tech Community. The Developer team, engineers have put a great deal of effort in over the last 5-6 weeks to reduce page load time.
Our azure monitoring is showing we have more than halved page load time in that time frame, with the average page load time globally (except china) of between 2.8 and 3.6 seconds. Our slowest page is the Community Hubs page (>7 seconds), which we know about and are working with the platform engineers to improve that before the new year.
That said we are not done and we have plans over the next few months to look into other data we might be able to cache to speed up page load times further. We are also planning to move the entire Microsoft Tech Community into the Azure cloud in early Dec which will help with stability and better geo-redundancy.
I am happy to take feedback on our UI elements, the best way to do that is via the Community Ideas board so we can prioritize your ask based upon the community popularity of your idea and our business needs.
We are also planning to do a complete refresh of the UI with a completely new skin later in 2021 but I will share more on that as it becomes available.
If either of you are opening to help me diagnose why your specifically getting slow response from the Microsoft Tech Community then please do email us and I will work with you to collect more information.
Allen wrote:
I am deeply disappointed to hear your having such a negative experience with the Microsoft Tech Community. The Developer team, engineers have put a great deal of effort in over the last 5-6 weeks to reduce page load time.
Our azure monitoring is showing we have more than halved page load time in that time frame, with the average page load time globally (except china) of between 2.8 and 3.6 seconds. Our slowest page is the Community Hubs page (>7 seconds), which we know about and are working with the platform engineers to improve that before the new year.
That said we are not done and we have plans over the next few months to look into other data we might be able to cache to speed up page load times further. We are also planning to move the entire Microsoft Tech Community into the Azure cloud in early Dec which will help with stability and better geo-redundancy.
I am happy to take feedback on our UI elements, the best way to do that is via the Community Ideas board so we can prioritize your ask based upon the community popularity of your idea and our business needs.
We are also planning to do a complete refresh of the UI with a completely new skin later in 2021 but I will share more on that as it becomes available.
If either of you are opening to help me diagnose why your specifically getting slow response from the Microsoft Tech Community then please do email us and I will work with you to collect more information.
Hi,
Thanks for the reply,
I will send you an email in few minutes.
also it's good to hear that you're moving to Azure, it's the best experience I've ever had on the web.
be it websites hosted on Azure, or game servers hosted there, always low ping and fast load times.
I don't live in China (but curious why it's slower there), when I compare the load times of YouTube's home page VS my profile page on MTC, MTC is 5 times slower.
majority of the time i'm seeing this at the bottom of the browser.
p.s the email hyperlink in the post points to:
mailto:techcommunity.microsoft.com?subject="Performance%20issues%20-%20F.A.O%20Allen
but the correct one is this i think? Allen
mailto:techcommunity@microsoft.com?subject="Performance%20issues%20-%20F.A.O%20Allen
HotCakeX Allen VasilMichev DanielNiccoli mrboxx
Sorry to tag you all but let e summerize what I get from this conversation:
- I replied to this thread many months ago and I still see that the conversation stands where I left it at that time. It is too frastrating to see instead of benchmarking agaist StackOverflow etc. we are talking about improvement to 3 seconds only.
- To be very honest, when I do have any questions, I go StackOverFlow instead of TechCommunity because:
- It works based on reputation so the answers have more quality. I see real answers in that forum. In the other hand, the only thing I see in the TechCmmunity is: "people only push for 'mark as answer' and there is no focus on answering the real question and helping the community.
- It supports comments and answers separately so I know what I am reading (whether it is a comment or answer). In TechCommunity forums, I am lost on following threads because of quotes and prolongs thread format.
- The perfomance is vital. It loads in milliseconds whereas TechCommunity is like outdated website loading in many seconds.
- UI is much better. The UI is compact and it delivers what I am looking for. In TechCommunity, all I see is WHITE SPACE and half of the screen (I attached the screenshot)
So the bottomline is, I as die-hard fan of Microsoft, would love to work on Microsoft enabled websites, use its products but there is a point where I should focus on other things. I appreciate the fact that teams working on this but to me it seems "Making over the TechCommunity" is not a priority for Microsoft and as long as this is the approach, Competitors will be ripping the benefit.
I agree with what you're saying, because it's the truth.
I've had my fair share of experience in many communities of StachExchange websites, even successfully proposed and built a new community there.
But, they are a Q&A community, while Microsoft Tech Community is based on discussions, much like Reddit. some posts are asking questions, some posts are merely informative etc.
discussions are more flexible way of allowing people to communicate. StackExchange websites have stricter rules for asking and answering questions, that's why the quality of the content there is much higher.
I think what Microsoft Tech Community needs is to have 2 kinds of posts. Discussion posts and Q&A posts.
- Discussion post: people can discuss about the subject of the post, no chit chat, no spam, no off topic.
- Q&A posts: people ask proper questions, the one who is asking the question needs to show that he/she has done fair amount of research before posting his/her question. so, nothing like: "How do I open Microsoft Edge?" or "Help me fix this". they should mention what they have tried already that didn't work and be specific. again, no spam, absolutely no chit chat, posts that try to answer the question should be able to be down voted if they don't answer the question or are low quality.
there are some fundamental changes needed to be applied to this website, but nothing that can't be done, it can, I just don't know if people like Allen can do it on their own or need permission from like MSFT CEO or someone else, before doing this.
and if they do it, they better keep it separate from this website, like on a separate domain, accessible only to the developers and people who willingly want to participate in testing the new website and report bugs etc. it will definitely pay off.
HotCakeX Thanks for the detailed response.
I totally agree and understand that MCT is for discussions and Q&A but I have few points here to share:
- Regardless of type of forum (Q&A or Discussion), the performance and appearance of website is just not aligned with Microsoft Brand. Loading pages everytime whereas we have remarkable frameworks to create SPA apps, is just outdated! Even now to reply to your response, the website redirected 2 times!
- The reasons other websites are more successful is because they "do it right the first time". They listen to the community and users. To me, it seems Microsoft Community team does not care about our feedback. The reason for invest our time and write detailed responses is to improve the platform and the company we love and value.
*edit thread split to keep this on topic*
- I replied to this thread many months ago and I still see that the conversation stands where I left it at that time. It is too frastrating to see instead of benchmarking agaist StackOverflow etc. we are talking about improvement to 3 seconds only.
