Time to display catalog items

[kevin_philpot]

In our environment, the majority of our catalog items reside in a folder (category) called "Software", there are about 850 catalog items.   From the time you click on this folder to the time the catalog items display, it takes approximately a full 60 seconds for the catalog items to display...this often leads to a lot of customer complaints due to this lag.

• Does this sound excessive?
• What types of things impact this time to display catalog items? (folder and visibility permissions, etc...)
• What can we do to improve this behavior? 

Thanks.

[CharlesW]

Kevin,
That sounds excessive, though I can't think of anybody that has that many items under a single category.. Do you have a large number of catalog items with visibility conditions? If you revisit the software category after the initial load, do you see the same delays? The catalog visibility results should be cached in the session, so I'd expect that you would likely not see the behavior upon visiting the software category a second time if it is the visibility conditions causing issues.. The catalog items themselves should be paged, so it's not as if App Portal should be trying to render them all on the same page at the same time.

[kevin_philpot]

Charles,

Yes..roughly 500 of 850 have some sort of visibility permissions applied directly on the catalog item. 

Test 1 - Here is what I found while testing: 

• initial load of "Software" folder (852 catalog items) takes: ~1 minute
• changing to another folder (64 catalog items) takes: ~8 seconds
• changing back to software folder (852 catalog items) takes: ~40 seconds
• changing to another folder (45 catalog items) takes: ~8 seconds
• changing back to software folder again(852 catalog items) takes: ~40 seconds

Test 2, I had another folder that I could test with that had 628 catalog items.

• Initial load of folder with (628)  catalog items ( w/combinations of folder permissions and catalog item visibility permissions applied) Initial load time: ~38 seconds
• Removed ALL visibility conditions on the catalog items (where they existed),  folder permissions still applied.  closed all browser sessions and reconnected. Initial load time:  ~38 seconds
• Removed all folder permissions (no visibility restrictions of any kind existing).  closed all browser sessions and reconnected. Initial load time:  ~23 seconds

So... at least from this simple test (test 2):   ~40% of the load time was (likely) the result of the permissions evaluation.    

[CharlesW]

Kevin,
After reviewing some old case notes, I came to the conclusion that perhaps paging is not enabled by default.. If you would, try running the following queries to enable paging.

insert into wd_appsettings values('DesktopBrowseCatalogPageSize','15')
insert into wd_appsettings values('EnablePagingForDesktop','True')

This will set the "page" size to 15.. Meaning that only 15 items will be loaded at a time when scrolling down the page..

NOTE: after running the above queries, you will need to perform an iisreset.

Let me know your results.

[kevin_philpot]

Charles, we definitely do not have the paging settings applied.   We'll give it a try tonight (after hours) to see what the results are after implementing and report back.

Thanks for the help. 

[jdempsey]

Yes, I would expect visibility conditions to have a big impact on the load time, which is why we normally try to steer clear of putting visibility conditions directly on catalog items and try to only use category security, if possible.  Obviously, that won't work for every use case and exceptions may apply.  Having said that, another potential impact to load times is the "Show installed apps" option under Site Management > Settings > Web Site > Catalog Behavior.  If you have that enabled, App Broker will query FNMS for the list of installed apps for the current device and will attempt to match those installed apps against the catalog items being displayed.  If you disable that setting, it may save some time in rendering the list of catalog items, but then users won't see a visual indicator to let them know if something is already installed.

[kevin_philpot]

I did adding in those paging settings, but found that it was taking about 40 seconds for each page of 15 catalog items to render, so that was not an improved experience, so we reversed that quickly.  

It was worth a try though.

[jdempsey · Accepted solution]

While working with another customer, I recently discovered another possible cause of slow page load times.  Check the file size of the icon files you're using.  While App Broker dynamically resizes the icons for display on the page, it still has to read the entire file and resize it.  If those file sizes are quite large, that will take longer to render the page.  You could try manually resizing the files to 80px by 80px (there are freeware tools that allow you to do that as a batch process).  That might help somewhat.

[kevin_philpot]

Jim, thanks for sending this along. We did have a mix of different file types and dimensions in our environment. I did take me a week or so but I was able to convert all of our images files to 80x80 pixel .png files. After doing so, it looks like that shaved about 10 seconds off of the time to render the 850+ catalog items when browsing the catalog. So this did help some.