How can SugarCRM performance be influenced?

"The numbers tell the tale", let the Prudento Client Performance Monitor tell you.

This will be the first in a series of blogs about SugarCRM and performance. There have been several reports on performance and sugarCRM but most of these focus on the server side, we will report on the whole picture. The server side is only part of the story, actually it is less than 47% of the story.

For the end user the only thing that matters is responsiveness. What is the influence of certain optimizations on the server side or upgrading a workstation. Without any means to measure the changes in responsiveness it is hard if not impossible to evaluate the effect of the changes made.

Loading time of a web page

For an end user this is sometimes hard to evaluate: when one is in a hurry everything seems to take a long time. But is it fair to say that the SugarCRM application is slow or is there another reason?

Responsiveness can be measured by determination of the page loading time. The page loading time depends on many variables:

• Server Response time
• Internet connection speed
• Browser type and -version,
  
• Server optimization
  
• Processor type en -power
• Amount of internal memory
• Degraded Windows installation, who doesn't recognize the fact that you need to reinstall Windows because the whole machine has become slow due to installed / de-installed programs and registry fragmentation?

How can we measure this?

Prudento has developed a tool to measure the complete loading time of a page, the Prudento Performance Client Monitor.
This tool was developed after performance issues at a clients installation and the (incorrect) conclusion was that our sugarCRM installation was slow, with the performance monitor we were able to proof that sugarCRM was not the problem, the network was.

It's not just the time it takes to generate a web page on the server side that is important, it is the time it takes from clicking a link or button until that page is loaded and available to the user.

The time it takes the server to generate the page is available on the bottom of a page in SugarCRM as the server response time.The Prudento performance monitor will tell the rest.

By monitoring on a work station how long it takes for a page to load, from click to finish we have a tool to monitor the actual time it takes to deliver and display a page in the browser. 

Store data on the SugarCRM server

In order to monitor the complete loading time and analyze the effect of changes and situations several registrations are necessary, these need to be stored on the server to combine information from different machines and situations. More information soon...

Planned reports:

• Browsers and their speed to load SugarCRM: Internet Explorer 7 and 8, Firefox 3.0 and 3.1, Chrome, Safari 4.0 and Opera 10
• Operating systems: Linux (Ubuntu), Windows XP, Windows Vista, Mac OS X, Virtual machines
  
• Server / browser optimizations: Caching, Compression
• Webservers: Apache, IIS, Nginx
• Database servers MySQL / MS SQL server
• Hosted / Eigen server
• Database server MySQL / MS SQL
• Hosted / On site
• SugarCRM 5.2 / 5.5 performance improvement
• Using different themes in SugarCRM
• Possibly a map of how a typical SugarCRM is used, what are the most frequent parts used within SugarCRM

Any suggestions?

Questions? Contact Prudento!