Access directly to server with XPINC...very very slow

Question

I have developed an application XPages that work very well in a Browser (Firefox ) and in every page the browser load max 150Kb of content (html, image, js, css...etc...)

When I have deploy the application to my remote user that directly access to server with XPiNC mode the speed are very very poor!

With a tool I sniffed the traffic and I see that for every GET there are 10Mbytes of data transfered (seem to transfer XML source and other code that is compiled on the fly...)

The application inside Notes Client is not useable so...and my customer has disappointed for this feature (is not possible use in local and replicate)

I have 8.5.3FP2 (client and server) with PRELOAD option setting.... without any change of this.

Have someone any suggest for me? Is this a BUG ?

Answer 1

It is true that remote applications (NSFs residing on a non-local server) are slower than local client replicas or remote apps run in a web browser. This is due to the fact that a lot more network transactions are generated when running in this mode. There are various things that can be done however to remedy the problem.

First however we need to identify the cause of the problem - you are seeing a 10MB transfer for each GET request, which is very large and will obviously negatively impact performance. One or more of the XPages in your application may be using the computeWithForm feature? If an XPages document data source "computes" a Notes form (typically to execute pre-existing application logic) then the form must be copied across the net to be computed in the local client. However all children of the form will also be hauled over - subforms, shared fields etc, and this can result in large net transactions like those you are seeing.

Often the computeWithForm feature is used as a development convenience and as long as the size of the form is small then the performance impact can be negligible. However, if the aggregate form is large, then it may be worth your while replacing the computeWithForm usage with separate XPages SSJS application logic.

Before going further we would need verify that this is in fact the issue - there could be other issues. Typically this manifests only on pages that open/edit documents - so you can maybe try turning computeWithForm off in a test environment and see if there is a difference.

Answer 2

XPiNC is a little special. When you open a server based NSF, all the program code needs to be downloaded to the client to be executed in the server container of the Notes client. The reasonable way to use an XPiNC with data in the server is to split the application. Have one NSF that contains all the program logic (all XPages and other code) and the other with forms, views and documents. Replicate the application NSF locally and access only the data on the server. This should give you much better performance. You could have a configuration setting to compute the data NSF, so disconnected users could use a local replica of the data.

Let us know how it goes.

P.S.: There are some more tuning ideas...