MTC is getting ridiculously slow

MVP

It takes a minute for a page to load today, what's going on? I know some people (me included) have been complaining about the performance for a while now, is anything being done about it?

67 Replies

Hi Vasil,

I agree to that, the performance of the MTC is really not good. For me, that's the case for a longer time. If I e.g. test some start pages of some spaces (e.g. the Office International Community or Excel) in GTMetrix, Pingdom or Dareboost, a lot of potential for improvements are shown.

Best,

Mourad

Was particularly bad for me yesterday, but yes, it has been sluggish for months now...

@Vasil Michev @Mourad Louha 

 

I am really sorry that this is your experience, not least of which because we are actually seeing the opposite occur, i.e. pages have been speeding up as we have been simplifying our code base.

 

At the moment most pages on the community render in under 3 seconds, which is our target load time. That said there will be one user every 30 minutes or so where it may take longer as the cache refreshes.

 

We have also been able to duplicate some significant drop in community performance (where some pages take up to 10-13 seconds to load) on internet explorer. This has only recently been identified and we will be undertaking some work shortly to see what we can do to improve performance for these visitors.

 

I am always happy to get reports of performance issues you experience, although because of the amount of information I need from you it would probably be better to email them in to the Tech Community Team.

 

If you continue to experience problems on browsers other than Internet Explorer then please send us this information:

 

  • A copy of your network tab in your browsers developer tools
  • What browser and browser version are you using
  • What OS and OS Version are you using
  • What type of device are you loading the community on?
  • Have you tried from a different network?
  • What network connection are you using? i.e. Wifi, Ethernet, 3G and 4G.
  • If you feel comfortable in command prompt please also run the following commands and send us the output:
tracert techcommunity.microsoft.com

ping techcommunity.microsoft.com

 

Hi @Allen,

thank you - I can of course send an e-mail with some data. However, I have a question: in Chrome, I can save the network tab as har file, which is relatively large. Is that, what you mean with a copy?

A TraceRT and Ping show me currently 163 ms until it reaches the TechCommunity after 13 hops. I can send a screenshot of that too.

I am generally using Chrome in its latest version, Windows 7 in German and a desktop PC connected by Ethernet to my FritzBox. I don't have access to a different network.

Best,

Mourad

Hi,

 

The Har file contains way more info than I need but you can send it if you need to.

 

Otherwise just take a screenshot of the timeline.. I want to see what resources are loading over what timeframe to see if there is a specific asset your loading that's causing it to run slow.

 

Oh also the URL you were using when you did this. 

Yeah, IE definitely behaves bad compared to other browsers, but it's not just a browser issue. Or a network issue. I have the exact same experience when I travel abroad, including when I'm in the states. I have the exact same experience on the mobile. I'm used to it by now, yesterday was simply double the pain. Every other forum I frequent is lightning fast compared to the MTC...

 

Here's another example of an performance issue that has nothing to do with the client side - these past few days when I open some spaces, most notably the Office 365 "general" one or Teams, the page loads (as slow as usual) and then I have to spend 30 more seconds waiting for the "spinner" before the first 5 threads actually appear.

 

Anyway, it does seem to work a bit better today, so maybe yesterday was just a particularly bad day. I do hope we get those IE improvements soon. But if you don't plan to "support" IE, just let us know accordingly.

@Vasil Michev 

 

Got it, we will take a look at what is causing the issues for IE, obviously as a Microsoft browser we want to support it but if that position ever changes we will of course let everyone know as far in advance as we can do. 

 

Mobile is a little different - we have a major piece of work, probably around the summer, to conduct a full review of the mobile experience. I am also hoping to setup a small group of users who represent our users to help us when we make design changes to make sure it make sense.

 

As I said above, any information you can share with me via e-mail will always help me with diagnosing your specific experience. So far the issue that @Mourad Louha is experiencing appears to relate to one single component in the community so I am going to take a look at that once I am back from Microsoft Ignite | The Tour London to see what might be causing the delay and what we can do to solve for it. 

 

Well tonight I'm using Edge, and I can confirm that the experience is much better compared to IE. I do get the occasional 5-10 seconds on the initial "spinner", but that seems to mostly affect popular spaces with dozen active threads. Oh well, guess I'll have to get used to a half-baked browser replacement...

@Vasil Michev 

 

I take it you mean the 'Trending Spaces' box on the right of the homepage?

 

I actually do not like it, partly because its slow and partly because I am not really sure how useful it is for everyone - would love some feedback on what you use it for? how upset would you be if we just removed it?

No, what I meant is that for some spaces at least, the initial page load finishes, but I have to wait some more for the actual threads to load. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Office-365/bd-p/Office365General is the prime example, even now, morning EU time it takes 10+ seconds on the "spinner":

 

MTCissue2.png

I don't really care about the trending spaces, I navigate the MTC via either my notifications or the My Home page.

I can just agree that MTC ”feels slow” compared to many other sites out there. Everytime I randomly browse MTC threads I feel that is slow. That being said, that doesn’t help you much so if you can provide us with some tooling (Chrome debug mode or some Extension) to help us provide you with more useful information, let us know.
Hello do you want to chat? I am Kialan.

Agree, there is a lot of room for improvement. I like the MTC, but browsing here is not very enjoyable.

 

Reddit front page

DOMContentLoaded 2.6 seconds.

load 4.07 seconds.

 

This thread

DOMContentLoaded 4.1 seconds.

load 8.3 seconds.

 

 

The other thing is that the reddit front page presents a lot more information (or single threads) than the MTC, so you have to load more pages to take in the same amount of information.

 

Round trip times are also really bad.

 

C:\>ping techcommunity.microsoft.com

Pinging gxcuf89792.lithium.com [208.74.205.202] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 208.74.205.202: bytes=32 time=173ms TTL=244
Reply from 208.74.205.202: bytes=32 time=174ms TTL=244
Reply from 208.74.205.202: bytes=32 time=176ms TTL=244

Ping statistics for 208.74.205.202:
Packets: Sent = 3, Received = 3, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 173ms, Maximum = 176ms, Average = 174ms


C:\>ping reddit.com

Pinging reddit.com [151.101.1.140] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 151.101.1.140: bytes=32 time=22ms TTL=56
Reply from 151.101.1.140: bytes=32 time=11ms TTL=56

Ping statistics for 151.101.1.140:
Packets: Sent = 2, Received = 2, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 11ms, Maximum = 22ms, Average = 16ms

 

@Allenyou say: "At the moment most pages on the community render in under 3 seconds, which is our target load time. That said there will be one user every 30 minutes or so where it may take longer as the cache refreshes."

 

Not for me, as I explained above. There is another thing. While the conversation view is rendered in about 4 seconds, I do not see any actual threads, because they get loaded with ajax calls AFTER the page has been rendered. And that takes another two seconds (on a good moment). Which makes five and is extremely long for the little content that is actually loaded.

Hi all,

 

Thanks for the extra details, we will investigate and I will get back to you as soon as I have more to share.

 

We want the community to be as snappy as we possibly can be, while also offering all the power users are many customizations and options as we can possibly serve. There is actually allot more data loaded via that ajax call than what you see when the page loads.

Anyway - I will update you as soon as I can. 

@Allen I feel I often would like to just casually browse the forums to see if I find an interesting thread.

 

So if I access a community, like: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Community-Discussion/bd-p/CommunityQuestions. Takes 9 seconds to load. I'm presented with 4 conversation threads. I press "Show more conversations", which sure, takes just a second or two but still only adding 4 converstations. So it would take ages for me to go through the latest let's say 100 conversations.

 

Compare this to www.reddit.com > Compact View and bam, 2 seconds and I get presented with the latest some 50 threads. Sure Reddit is extreme but even the good old 10 year old TechNet Social forums (https://social.technet.microsoft.com/forums/) does a good job, loads in a second or two and shows 20 threads.

 

So just letting us choose a "Compact View" instead of an "Expanded view" would be a good start. Check out Reddit startpage and the view, that's a good example.

@Allen I also have huge ping response times to techcommunity.microsoft.com (around 160 ms) compared to social.technet.microsoft.com (12 ms). Sure, it depends on where you are in the world (I'm in Europe) but to be honest, that shouldn't matter in a global community. MxToolBox ping test shows 60 ms.

@Jonas Back 

 

Hi Jonas - we know the community is slower outside NA because we are not yet cloud migrated. Lithium are working on this for us and that will help. I am in Scotland and I can confirm your ping times aren't far off mine.

 

I would love to be able to say 'here you go that's it fixed for everyone' but the reality is that what ever is causing the slow response times (especially on IE) is mixture of complex connections without a simple fix. We will take the data we have had submitted by community members and we will look to see what we can do to improve and where.

 

As I said earlier - I will of course loop back to you once we have more to share. 

@Allen Awesome! I'm just happy someone official is listening and doing their best to improve this awesome community space.

Any news? Average RTT from Germany is still 171 ms. :(