TM1 10.1.1 Web performance

[DC9]

We are just in the middle if an upgrade from TM1 9.2 to TM1 10.1.x we have noticed a significant reduction in performance when using both Internet Explorer 8 and 9 vs Firefox. Example in contributor (now TM1 web applications) trying to load a budget model and display the relevany excel sheets...IE 8 and 9 take at least 4 times longer to present the data and that is on our local network only, not remotely. Anyone else notice the same issue and have any suggestions? (It also runs a lot quicker on chrome but is not supported by IBM on that browser so I'm leaving it out)
We are pretty tied to IE so its becoming a real issue.
We are ruinning TM1 10.1.1 on Win server 2008 R2 and accessing through XP and win & workstations. I understand this is entirely browser side and have done alll the usual add on tweaking etc. e.g turn all addon soff, add site to safe zones, turn of av scanning. Pretty much everything.
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[Duncan P]

Have a look on the internet for relative performance stats of the JavaScript engines in Firefox and IE. Look also in task manager to see the relative increase in CPU time for each browser when loading the same view. You will have to add the CPU time column which is hidden by default in task manager.

If it is the JavaScript then there is nothing you can do - except perhaps try to persuade Microsoft to use the JavaScript engine from Firefox or from Chome, both of which are open source, in their next version. Good luck with that.

[jstrygner]

We were using TM1Web with 9.5.2 and now we use it with 10.1.1.
We definitely did not experience significant difference in speed, so I doubt this is pure TM1 upgrade problem (not sure if by 9.2 you mean 9.5.2 or some other version).

What did improve TM1Web websheets generation time was switching to .NET4. I would roughly estimate it made some of our sheets refresh around 3 times faster. The gain was there with 9.5.2 first and now with 10.1.1 also. We use IE9.

So in case you are not on .NET4, maybe this will help. Here instructions to set it:
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.w ... wg27024528

[DC9]

I appreciate your replies guys. Yes we are already on .Net 4 so I suspect it is (sigh) the Javascript engine. I am not very optimistic about improving things. Its just hard to believe that IBM are actually recommending Firefox as the browser of choice..thats the answer I got from them.

[Duncan P]

Background

[jim wood]

I appreciate your replies guys. Yes we are already on .Net 4 so I suspect it is (sigh) the Javascript engine. I am not very optimistic about improving things. Its just hard to believe that IBM are actually recommending Firefox as the browser of choice..thats the answer I got from them.

It's not hard to believe really. Microsoft are a competitor. Why would they recommend IE? I think they would move away from Excel if they had a choice. (BTW IE is horrible, I wouldn't recommend it either.)

[DC9]

yeah Jim but IBM aren't in the browser business and I would guess the majority of their TM1 customers are IE users. It isnt straightforward for large corporations to change browsers on a whim and many are absoultely tied to IE.

[jim wood]

Very true. I was playing devils advocate keeping their current product road map in mind. They have just started releasing versions of the server software that runs on Linux. IBM are very in tune with whole open source thing at the moment. I guess we'll have to wait to see where it goes. It's like Apple and Google. Apple tried to pretend they could do without Google but realized very quickly they couldn't.

[Alan Kirk]

I appreciate your replies guys. Yes we are already on .Net 4 so I suspect it is (sigh) the Javascript engine. I am not very optimistic about improving things. Its just hard to believe that IBM are actually recommending Firefox as the browser of choice..thats the answer I got from them.

It's not hard to believe really. Microsoft are a competitor. Why would they recommend IE? I think they would move away from Excel if they had a choice. (BTW IE is horrible, I wouldn't recommend it either.)

It is, but a quick search of Google will show any number of articles about how Firefox is bleeding marketshare. (Predominantly but not exclusively to Chrome, which I use out of necessity (alongside Firefox; long story) but don't particularly like. Actually I use IE for some things as well.) I saw a chart recently where the share looked like metaphorical lemmings going off a cliff.

Part of this, I suspect, is the thing that was discussed here; it's hard to take a browser seriously for corporate use (I emphasise) when it's not only releasing a new version every few weeks (making testing an effective impossibility) but has a history of randomly breaking its add-ons when doing so. I do however grant that this seems to have been less of an issue in the last umpteenth releases. I can't remember when the last time I got a "This add-on won't work with Firefox any more, too bad, sucker, we'll do what we like" message was. And the last few versions seem to have been more stable than earlier ones which I for one found were crashing on a regular basis.

IE suffers predominantly from the "Can't trust the user, why don't we go out of our way to endlessly irritate them?" mindset that seems to have permeated MS since Vista. Pop-ups which have "Do what I'm suggesting right now" and "Ask me later" buttons but no "Get the **** out of my face forever" button, I'm looking in your general direction. Doubly so when you go to use TM1 Help (such as it is, in its 7 separate silos (they're really never going to fix that, are they?)) and get the message "To help protect your security (ug! sekuritee is magik-word, it excuse any amount of stupidity if you say 'sekuritee'), IE has restricted this web page from running scripts". To which I click to tell it to run them, just as I always do. And get an "Are ya sure, are ya sure, are ya really really sure?" dialog, at which point I need to ensure that I do not have a loaded weapon in reach and calmly click the button that I see in my mind as saying "Yes, I'm just as sure as the last seven thousand ******* times I told you to run it". (Yes, there is a setting to prevent this problem under Internet Options -> Advanced -> Security -> Allow Active content to run in files on My Computer... IF it's not restricted by IT department policies.)

However, its one redeeming virtue, from a corporate perspective, is that each version stays around for quite a while. You can therefore fully test your web based applications against it, knowing that a bunch of cowboys (and I'm not using that expression in an entirely derogative sense, at least for personal use software) aren't going to come along 6 weeks later and change something so that it breaks your functionality.

Also, I still have un-fond memories of the last time we deployed Web under 9.1, and websheets displayed correctly on IE but were an abomination on FF.

It's in that context that I agree with DC9 about it being a surprising suggestion.

The context in which I agree with Jim is that some of us are well aware of the seeming anti-Microsoft crusade going on inside IBM, which the "Oh let's put everything on a web canvas and try to get people off Excel" direction of 10.1 was a manifestation of. (And which Steve Vincent wrote a scathing and highly accurate critique of elsewhere in these pages.) As I've said before, every time IBM takes a shot at Microsoft, the shot usually passes through them and hits the end users. Recommending a browser like Firefox which is great for end users who can put up with a bit of quirkiness over a slow changing, relatively robust browser like IE for use in a businessplace is another example of this.

[Duncan P]

The concerns over stability and frequency of update in Firefox are addressed by them with their ESR channel. ESR stands for "Extended Support Release". It has been on minor variants of version 10 for at least the last year.

More info is here.

[dkleist]

While technically the FF resolution is responsive, it's a non-starter from a marketing and sales perspective. Unless the sales effort includes caveats of "do not use IE", clients will likely feel victimized by a bait-and-switch. That would not be helpful for any long-term positioning within a client nor for market growth.