Poor Data Entry Performance in 10.1.1 Contributor Web

[rturpyn]

Has anyone else experienced extremely poor performance when entering data into a cube with more than 25 or so rows in the Contributor Web client?

We have a cube used purely for data entry. It's essentially an account hierarchy (100 or so items), time, versions, projects. Projects is our approval hierarchy for the Contributor application, accounts are our rows.

With all of the accounts expanded, when you enter data and hit enter it'll take approximately 8 seconds for the screen to refresh with the total. In my test I'm entering a value in Jan and using the spread shortcut key. ex: 50>

When I collapse all but a few of the accounts so that I'm now only looking at about 10 rows and enter the same data, it takes less than 2 seconds for the screen to refresh.

I'm aware of Web.config file and the settings change you can make there. However the default values are 100 and we haven't deviated from them. I'd expect data entry in a cube with no rules and less than 100 rows and only 13 columns to be near instantaneous.

Anyone else noticing this? Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Ryan

[LanceTylor]

Hi All,

Ryan - Did you manage to resolve the performance issue or tweak anything to make it better? I seem to be encountering a similar issue. I am using IE 8, TM10.1.1, Win server 8. I tested FireFox and Chrome and both perform 5 times faster than IE but the client does not support these other browsers.

Similarly the cube view I am using is for data entry and needs to be expanded for users to input. In the test case I am using I have nested two dimensions within the row totaling 84 elements when expanded (7 - approval hierarchy/CostCentre & 12 from the category dimension = 7x12=84). When I filter on the category dimension choosing only 1 element (so 7 in elements in the row) it performs much faster.

Results
Collapsing and Expanding elements (primarily expanding elements) - IE 17-20 seconds, FF/Chrome - 3 seconds
Entering data ALL elements expanded - IE 16-18 seconds, FF/Chrome - 2 seconds
Entering data filtering on 1 category element (7 elements in the row) = IE 4 seconds, 2 seconds

Does anyone have any suggestions on how best to improve performance.

Thanks in advance for any feedback

Regards
Lance

[foogy]

Results
Collapsing and Expanding elements (primarily expanding elements) - IE 17-20 seconds, FF/Chrome - 3 seconds
Entering data ALL elements expanded - IE 16-18 seconds, FF/Chrome - 2 seconds
Entering data filtering on 1 category element (7 elements in the row) = IE 4 seconds, 2 seconds

I can confirm similar results at our site. IE8 is poor, however IE9 performs better but still far away from Chrome or FireFox. I spent some time in debugging javascript and found out that approx. 85% of the page refresh time is wasted on calculating cell widths in javascript functions. The same function (part of the outdated Dojo framework version which web contributor is based on) is called several thousand times for a larger grid. While Chrome and FF perform very well, IE has no chance here. The data transfer from TM1 server to browser only consumes parts of a second.

I'm quite disappointed - hard to sell that customers need to accept that when only IE is available. I think the problem is in the old Dojo framework version combined with IE8. There are javascript grids on the web that perform so much faster even in IE. So let's hope for future releases.

foogy

[rturpyn]

When discussing with IBM they acknowledged the poor IE performance and said it was something they were working on. Another issue with Firefox is that copy and paste do not work. IBM's aware of this too, but again, no fix as of yet.

Everything we've done has simply been work arounds. We've broken cubes into multiple views or additional cubes to limit the number of rows being displayed. If anyone else has other suggestions please share.

[LanceTylor]

Thanks for the responses. We are upgrading to IE9 coupled with smaller cube views/grids and custom subsets (for users to chose).