Forum Discussion
MTC is getting ridiculously slow
It takes a minute for a page to load today, what's going on? I know some people (me included) have been complaining about the performance for a while now, is anything being done about it?
5 years and not much has changed. I still get inital load times of 5-10 seconds when visiting the techcommunity.
- Allen
Community Manager
While we have seen some slowing down of the community in the last week or so this speed is not typical of our average users experience, we have reports now on each pages average load time and the vast majority load within 1.5 seconds. There are of course some that take longer.
If you wouldn't mind creating a Har file for the experience your having so I can look at the communication between your browser and our systems then I would be happy to look into this further. You can either DM me the har file or email our team.
I do also want to manage expectations, the site is about as quick as we can make it on the current infrastructure and code, however these is a new stack coming later this year (we are already planning for it) which we believe will make this much quicker.The new stack leverages update website scripting languages, is designed for different screen sizes and has accessibility compliance baked in. We feel this will significantly improve the user experience.
I really do find the info on MTC to be useful and do want to spend more time reading through it to discover more. HOWEVER, it's so slow that it's not just practical to use.
Compared to similar sites - e.g. stackoverflow - MTC is...
- far too slow to expect people to use. something is wrong. don't ask me to diagnose what's wrong, the Microsoft need to start taking this seriously
- a terrible UI - text areas too narrow, far too much page space used up by non-valuable banners, icons etc.
Take a good look at stackoverflow/stackexchange and question why does that site/platform work so well for what it is designed, and why is techcommunity so bad. You'd do us all a big favour by changing platforms.
mrboxx wrote:I really do find the info on MTC to be useful and do want to spend more time reading through it to discover more. HOWEVER, it's so slow that it's not just practical to use.
Compared to similar sites - e.g. stackoverflow - MTC is...
- far too slow to expect people to use. something is wrong. don't ask me to diagnose what's wrong, the Microsoft need to start taking this seriously
- a terrible UI - text areas too narrow, far too much page space used up by non-valuable banners, icons etc.
Take a good look at stackoverflow/stackexchange and question why does that site/platform work so well for what it is designed, and why is techcommunity so bad. You'd do us all a big favour by changing platforms.
Totally agree.
the load times are ridiculous. my Internet is not a bottleneck, my CPU and hardware is not the bottleneck, it's the website itself that loads slowly. and people having been reporting this for almost a year now but no change has been made!
- Allen
I am deeply disappointed to hear your having such a negative experience with the Microsoft Tech Community. The Developer team, engineers have put a great deal of effort in over the last 5-6 weeks to reduce page load time.
Our azure monitoring is showing we have more than halved page load time in that time frame, with the average page load time globally (except china) of between 2.8 and 3.6 seconds. Our slowest page is the Community Hubs page (>7 seconds), which we know about and are working with the platform engineers to improve that before the new year.
That said we are not done and we have plans over the next few months to look into other data we might be able to cache to speed up page load times further. We are also planning to move the entire Microsoft Tech Community into the Azure cloud in early Dec which will help with stability and better geo-redundancy.
I am happy to take feedback on our UI elements, the best way to do that is via the Community Ideas board so we can prioritize your ask based upon the community popularity of your idea and our business needs.
We are also planning to do a complete refresh of the UI with a completely new skin later in 2021 but I will share more on that as it becomes available.
If either of you are opening to help me diagnose why your specifically getting slow response from the Microsoft Tech Community then please do email us and I will work with you to collect more information.
Each page load takes 17-25 seconds for me and some times don't load page for me
- Allen
Hi all,
Thank you for your updates, we to have seen some degradation of the site performance over last 7-10 days, with occasional messages like 'Your request is being processed' showing up.
We are exploring those urgently with Khoros.
HotCakeX - We have not seen the messages your seeing but also the servers which we are on today are hosted in San Jose, CA so folks with slow peerage / data connections to the USA will see slower loading times.
We completely understand that slow speeds are not good and so there are a number of projects we are working with Khoros to bring to fruition, some of them are (in expected order of delivery):
- CSS styling will only load rules for the page your currently on
- A homepage refresh (which will also feed into other pages across the site) of which page load time will be an important factor
- A move to a Geo-Redundant Azure backbone that will allow us to scale better and ensure content is delivered to end users in a more efficient manner.
The exact delivery of these is still being worked on but the CSS Styling changes are being implemented in the next month or so.
Obviously these are large tasks and its important we get them right, please do keep sharing your experience with us and I will update you with more information as these improvements come on stream.
All the best
- Me and my friends from other parts of the world (Asia) are experiencing the same thing. once I had to wait even 15 seconds (more or less) for my profile page to load, it was already cached in the browser.
- FWIW, the performance is much better this evening.
- Is there an ETA for the cloud migration?
Any news? Today it's especially slow. Every page load takes up to 30 secods.
Agree, there is a lot of room for improvement. I like the MTC, but browsing here is not very enjoyable.
Reddit front page
DOMContentLoaded 2.6 seconds.
load 4.07 seconds.
This thread
DOMContentLoaded 4.1 seconds.
load 8.3 seconds.
The other thing is that the reddit front page presents a lot more information (or single threads) than the MTC, so you have to load more pages to take in the same amount of information.
Round trip times are also really bad.
C:\>ping techcommunity.microsoft.com
Pinging gxcuf89792.lithium.com [208.74.205.202] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 208.74.205.202: bytes=32 time=173ms TTL=244
Reply from 208.74.205.202: bytes=32 time=174ms TTL=244
Reply from 208.74.205.202: bytes=32 time=176ms TTL=244Ping statistics for 208.74.205.202:
Packets: Sent = 3, Received = 3, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 173ms, Maximum = 176ms, Average = 174ms
C:\>ping reddit.comPinging reddit.com [151.101.1.140] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 151.101.1.140: bytes=32 time=22ms TTL=56
Reply from 151.101.1.140: bytes=32 time=11ms TTL=56Ping statistics for 151.101.1.140:
Packets: Sent = 2, Received = 2, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 11ms, Maximum = 22ms, Average = 16msAllenyou say: "At the moment most pages on the community render in under 3 seconds, which is our target load time. That said there will be one user every 30 minutes or so where it may take longer as the cache refreshes."
Not for me, as I explained above. There is another thing. While the conversation view is rendered in about 4 seconds, I do not see any actual threads, because they get loaded with ajax calls AFTER the page has been rendered. And that takes another two seconds (on a good moment). Which makes five and is extremely long for the little content that is actually loaded.
- Allen
Hi all,
Thanks for the extra details, we will investigate and I will get back to you as soon as I have more to share.
We want the community to be as snappy as we possibly can be, while also offering all the power users are many customizations and options as we can possibly serve. There is actually allot more data loaded via that ajax call than what you see when the page loads.
Anyway - I will update you as soon as I can.Allen I also have huge ping response times to techcommunity.microsoft.com (around 160 ms) compared to social.technet.microsoft.com (12 ms). Sure, it depends on where you are in the world (I'm in Europe) but to be honest, that shouldn't matter in a global community. MxToolBox ping test shows 60 ms.
- Hello do you want to chat? I am Kialan.
- Was particularly bad for me yesterday, but yes, it has been sluggish for months now...
- Allen
I am really sorry that this is your experience, not least of which because we are actually seeing the opposite occur, i.e. pages have been speeding up as we have been simplifying our code base.
At the moment most pages on the community render in under 3 seconds, which is our target load time. That said there will be one user every 30 minutes or so where it may take longer as the cache refreshes.
We have also been able to duplicate some significant drop in community performance (where some pages take up to 10-13 seconds to load) on internet explorer. This has only recently been identified and we will be undertaking some work shortly to see what we can do to improve performance for these visitors.
I am always happy to get reports of performance issues you experience, although because of the amount of information I need from you it would probably be better to email them in to the Tech Community Team.
If you continue to experience problems on browsers other than Internet Explorer then please send us this information:
- A copy of your network tab in your browsers developer tools
- What browser and browser version are you using
- What OS and OS Version are you using
- What type of device are you loading the community on?
- Have you tried from a different network?
- What network connection are you using? i.e. Wifi, Ethernet, 3G and 4G.
- If you feel comfortable in command prompt please also run the following commands and send us the output:
tracert techcommunity.microsoft.com ping techcommunity.microsoft.com
- Hello
I am not sure whether this problem was addressed or not. But the website is too sluggish for me. It takes abnormally more than expected time to load pages. I am able to browse websites, blogs and perform other activities very well however MTC pages takes long time to load which is very frustrating. Any insight or solution will be appreciated.
Hi Vasil,
I agree to that, the performance of the MTC is really not good. For me, that's the case for a longer time. If I e.g. test some start pages of some spaces (e.g. the Office International Community or Excel) in GTMetrix, Pingdom or Dareboost, a lot of potential for improvements are shown.
Best,
Mourad
