How do I speed up the response of the SPE Web Console?

This article applies to:

• MailMarshal SPE

Question:

Symptoms:

• Customers complain of the site being slow, even though the IIS and SQL Servers are not running at high CPU or RAM Usage.
• Pages with large data sets or complex tables take a long time to render

Resolution:

These issues typically relate to actual available IP bandwidth as well as workstation speed (complex tables use the local CPU to render on screen positions).

Whilst there is not much you can do to increase the speed of the workstation, there are options available to increase the perceived throughput of the system.

Option 1 - Upgrade saturated IP links

You should check your outgoing links from the web console server to ensure that no saturation is occurring on these circuits. Usage levels greater than 90% could cause the appearance of a slow site due to IP congestion.

Although this option will only alleviate the bandwidth constraint from your server, it will not eliminate bandwidth issues further upstream. See option 2 for an additional solution to assist in this.

Option 2 - HTTP Compression 

Consider enabling IIS Dynamic Compression. The results of a query are compressed using various protocols such as gzip, and this compressed HTML is sent to the remote browser (much like zipping a file before sending it via email).

Modern browsers support HTML compression via any of a number of protocols and will be able to decompress the HTML for rendering. If the browser does not support compression, the web server will not compress the content before sending it.

Typically, compression can result in a 150-400% improvement in apparent speed in the web console, as well as 30% reduction in outbound bandwidth usage.