Slow CLEARBOOKS

Mobeen, Clearbooks is not fast in Chrome or any other browser. The biggest problem is with your Javascript, you are loading 94 separate Javascript files on every page. On my computer each page takes between 3 and 8 seconds to load. Even if you just concatenated those files together it would probably be a big improvement.

Tim, thank you for acknowledging the problem and prioritising fixing it.

I really hope that going forward you will start routinely monitoring page load times and take the performance impact into account when making changes or adding new features.

Hi Tim. Thanks for that. I agree with Victoria. I love using clearbooks and would also like to continue Kind regards Marcelle

Thank you Tim. It is good to know that this is being worked on, I dread doing the accounts right now,because everything takes four times as long as it should. Before this happened I loved using Clearbooks! Looking forward to it being resolved.

It has been painfully slow for months now, to the point where if I hadn't paid for an annual subscription I would be leaving. It is so frustrating.

That is strange, it is still slow for me in Chrome.

James - thanks for alerting me to this on Twitter. Marcelle - I will continue the conversation with you here in this public forum.

We have had a few reports from customers, including this thread, that there has been a deterioration in performance over the last few months . This is a topic that has worked it's way to the top of our priority list.

For the techies reading, it appears that the deterioration may coincide with our increased adoption of Angular and we will be looking at optimising that as well as other ways to improve performance. Our product team has an existing focus on defects for the next couple of weeks (our existing sprint) after which we will have time to address this properly.

Please have patience, but I wanted to say that we have heard your feedback about performance slowing, we are aware of it and we will resolve it shortly.

I wish I had not put my client onto this. Every page takes an age to load and changing the chart of account codes is nigh on impossible. Pulling my hair out!

Hi, I just wondered if there was any update to this. I'm just starting my quarterly accounting and its as slow, if not slower, as ever.

Hey Simon,

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you, the performance project is underway and we are researching the areas of the system which need improving together with making some quick changes.

I'll respond to your post outlining a number of HTTP content delivery issues.

1. I've performed some browser tests which show that the gzip compression we set up is being delivered correctly. This compression type is widely supported, and provides a good ratio between inflated:deflated. I can think of no reason for any request not to use this method, Was there a specific request you were looking at which showed this? Were you hoping for some other compression technique?
2. You are correct, we aren't using minification and are instead relying on the aforementioned gzip. Adding minification would give a small improvement. I've kept a note of it, but we have lots of ideas in our backlog already.
3. This is in our backlog as something which needs more research. Both HTTP2 and concatenation of files provide a potential solution, but we'll need to analyse which option would be best for our customers current browser usage.
4. While the assets such as CSS, JS and images can be multiplexed, most of the requests which go through to the PHP layer are forced to be consecutive due to session locking. While this is required for pages which require page reloads, we are acutely aware of the implications this has on the AJAX options in our app. We also have this in our backlog.
5. Thank you for your prompt on this, we increased the cache lifetime when you raised this. If you aren't seeing improvements give me a shout.

Hope this update was useful. Once more research has been performed we'll have a better idea of the benefits reaped and cost of making them, and be able to prioritise the backlog accordingly. I'll update you when I can give some firmer information on this. If you have any information you wish to pass over in private contact our support team and they'll pass it over.

Thanks, Adrian.

I've been told this is being looked into and a timeline for improvements will be posted once its available.

If you're using edge on windows 10 I also see loads of 404 requests, this doesn't return a simple 404 page but the whole home page. Thus its a very expensive operation.

Whats even more confusing is that the site appears to have NewRelic tracking and thus this should all be available to them to easily see. Thus they must be either acting on it and thus it would be good to know, or they are ignoring it in which case I'm going to jump ship.

My finance team just can't use it. Its takes hours to do simple invoicing.

I completely agree Simon. I pointed out the problem with the number of files being loaded on each page 3 months ago and since then all that has happened is that even more have been added making it even slower. Fixing this alone would probably make a big difference to the page load times. I can't understand why this isn't being taken seriously and fixed as an urgent priority.

On further investigation you seem to employing every anti pattern for performance.

1. files aren't returned compressed
2. 1 is made worse because you aren't minifying content
3. you aren't bundling files together resulting in 100s of calls per page
4. 3 is made worse because it appears your webservers can't handle concurrent requests and all requests are just queued highlighted by TTFB being increasing for the a set of requests made at the same time.
5. static js and css content expires immediately.

If I was a betting man I would have though I would have been looking at a development environment setup to aid debugging rather than a production one.

Prime example being seen here in a static file header.

/**

• Clear Books JavaScript XMPP Client
• @author Patrick Kerrigan
• @author Craig Bass

I'm finding it amazingly slow. It takes 8 -10s per page load, any operation is 8-10s

Angular is supposed to be lightweight for a single page app. It appears that you've chosen angular and not a single page app, meaning that all the overhead is being loaded on each page.

The home page take 24 s to load and makes 170 requests.

Something awfully wrong.

If it was such a pain to move I'd be switching immediately to FreeAgent, that has

I've just returned to do my quarterly accounting to find it is even slower now than it was last time. It is going to take me hours longer than it needs to, sadly I will need to spend some time evaluating alternatives because it is totally unworkable now.

Me too - slow on Chrome, worse on Firefox and unthinkable to even bother with Explorer.. this needs fixing especially at this time of year with 'the' deadline approaching for SAs. My clients, who use Clearbooks, are already making noises about moving to Zero.

Using Google Chrome browser has solved the problem of the slowness.

Hi. I have been using new windows 10 microsoft edge and it is still painfull. Have been in contact with Tim, one of the directors and still waiting for a final answer

Hi Ruth,

We apologies for any inconvenience caused.

We are currently aware of this and are making the relevant adjustments to make sure that the system goes as smoothly as possible. We recommend our clients to use Google Chrome if possible because the Clear Books system is fast with that. If this is something that you are currently not using then can you please try it with Google Chrome and let us know.

Best regards,

Mobeen

It's ridiculously slow. The suggestion to use a different machine is not proactive or helpful.

Hello Mike,

We apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Our development team is highly prioritising preferences issues and hopefully it will be better in the future.

I could only suggest to try using Clear books in another browser or even on another machine if you can.

Best regards, Volodymyr

I also had big problems with clearbooks yesterday 289/15. Was ready to give up on it, then today it's working fine. This kind of inconsistency is very frustrating. I too checked other progs on the internet and found no problem, also checked my download and upload speed which were fine too.

Hi John. I found it has something to do with my laptop. It does not like something in clearbooks. Any input I make takes for ever. Checked on my old laptop and it works fine. I have run scans and repairs to see if it clears the problem. It is slightly better but still not as quick as it should be. Any suggestions?

Hi Marcelle,

Are you finding it slow navigating around the app in general or performing a specific actions? Have you tried Clear Books on any other devices or connected to any different networks?