Reviewing Atlas Performance in your browser

From time to time do your Atlas pages seem to load slowly? Does content sometimes struggle to appear in the time it usually takes? Is one of your users complaining that Atlas is loading too slowly?

"Loading more slowly than expected" is a simple phrase but one which is often a struggle to break down further to identify a cause. What do slow loading times mean and what can you do to help improve them?

Slow is a perception which in the case of the internet is often subjective depending on situation, location and technology. ClearPeople and your internal IT teams would like to help as much as possible to ensure Atlas users are happy with the performance of your digital workplace.

First off, it is important to understand that Atlas is built on Microsoft Office 365 technology. In the vast majority of cases performances issues will be related to the user's or firm's network, technology, and location, with a large multitude of variables impacting network performance.

Main topics in this article

• Page diagnostics for SharePoint
• Install the extension
• How to use the diagnostics extension
• Interpret the results
• How to act & Microsoft Supporting Articles

Any slow performance speeds need to be understood - usually with 'what?' and then 'why?' with solutions and improvements coming out only after these two questions have been answered. The Page diagnostics for SharePoint browser extension (on Chrome and Edge/Explorer) will help you answer these and is also recommended by Microsoft.

Page diagnostics for SharePoint

You can use this tool to analyze performance of your site pages and get recommendations for optimization.

Please note that this testing is suggestive as it looks at incoming load times from to the user's browser. For example; there could be IT security or monitoring services in the network environment or on the user's device which are slowing loading times down, or the user may have 30 tabs open across two different browsers whilst simultaneously running a heavy-duty program running complex tasks. Generally slow internet or poor device health or settings or intensive use will negatively impact performance.

The article in this link provides a deeper breakdown to what a user can do or change to help improve performance.

Install the extension

Open your Edge Browser and go to "Extensions"

Search for Page diagnostics for SharePoint and add the extension to your browser

How to use the diagnostics extension

When you have the extension installed you can start analyzing the performance of site pages

Hit the icon when being on a site page and hit the start button

The tool will start collecting data

You will receive an output similar to this

Interpret the results

Some global feedback:

• Any load time below 5 seconds (5000ms) should be seen as reasonable for an intranet but depending on the page, technology, location and circumstances, load times can often take longer and would be expected.
• Some impact from tyGraph and the header is totally normal, sometimes web parts will often take longer than 2000ms as well

Page load time value shows the time your page needs to load which is related to your individual browser.

SPRequestDuration is the performance of the database servers in the Microsoft Data Centers (MS365 servers)

SPIISLatency is the server latency, that is, the time it takes for the server to send packets of data and information to the user's location

If necessary you can check the network trace and export it to a JSON file (for example to include in a support ticket so developers can investigate further). However this file is only capturing page data through the users browser.

Pay attention to large images as this is often something which may impact your performance and the page weight

CDN issues and large number of SharePoint calls is expected. CDN cannot be used to reference images from SPFx code (confirmed by Microsoft support already) and SharePoint calls is proportional to the number of web parts and elements in search webparts showing in a page.

 

Extensions are referring to header, footer and tyGraph. If the number is above 5 seconds we could investigate further but when we talk about the header/footer this will typically be caused by having too many items in the Global Navigation and/or the launchpad, in any case the performance of the header/footer shouldn't be impacting on the page performance feel.

 

 

 

How to act

If you think your pages are loading slowly we advise that first of all try to understand the reason based on this Page Diagnostics for SharePoint extension.

In case after reviewing the results from Page Diagnostics you still think there's something wrong please consider the following article which provides a deeper breakdown to what can often impact performance.

 

A great way to test performance is to use a wired connection to ensure as many variables stemming from your wireless connection (WAN) are bypassed and your restart your laptop and perform tests with no other programs, apps or tabs running.

 

If multiple tests with multiple users across a variety of pages at different times of the day consistently show slower loading times (5 seconds being a reasonable load time), ClearPeople would always advise, as Atlas sits in your Office365 tenant (Microsoft Cloud technology using off-site servers sitting in a central location or locations), to raise a ticket with your IT Support desk (or similar).

 

There are three useful Microsoft support articles which may be of interest to either yourself or your IT department

 

Office 365 Network Planning & Performance

Tune Microsoft Office 365 Performance

Tune SharePoint Online Performance

If your IT triages the query and decides there is a legitimate issue with the performance of either Atlas or their Office365 environment please raise a ticket with our support desk so we may assist in investigating the issue.

Please ensure to include as much information as possible from the previous testing and from the diagnostics from several users. Some options might be:

 

- a screen recording where you go over the different messages in the output of the extension

- the export file in JSON format

- screenshots of the different error messages

 

If our team has an account on your environment we'll do the same capture and compare differences trying to understand your experience because slow loading pages might be due to differences in network connection speed etc.

Please note we would be following the same instructions as the this article and requesting information outlined within and if needed we would follow the help outlined in the Microsoft articles above to review your SharePoint Online & Office365 Performance.

 

Atlas is an out-of-the-box Product which both ClearPeople and our clients all use the same version of (with a few exceptions), although of course performance will vary depending on a large number of factors and variables. It is important to note that it is unlikely we will be able to make any alterations or improvements directly to your Atlas via back-end configuration in order to improve the baseline performance. Performance & load testing has been a large part of our QA (testing & release) process for a number of years and we feel we have optimised this as far as currently possible.

 

 

Anyhow, don't hesitate to connect to our team if your internal IT team agree that the output of the extension is not giving you enough clarity on the performance of your SharePoint pages and we would be happy to discuss this further with you.