Performance Improvement Suggestions

[support]

We've had some feedback from customers that Passwordstate can be a little slow at times when browsing around the site, so we've put together some suggestions which may help.
 

***UPDATE 6th December 2018***

If you are still receiving poor performance, please refer to this new forum post to which will show you how to run a custom script to query your environment.  This will help our support troubleshoot your issue quicker: https://www.clickstudios.com.au/community/index.php?/topic/2518-passwordstate-support-information-script/

 

***UPDATE 19th July 2017***

Coming in Passwordstate 8, our next major version due to be release by the end of July 2017, is a new feature called "Load on Demand".  This new setting allows the Navigation tree to only load the portion of the tree structure that you expand.  This significantly reduces that amount of HTML that needs to be returned to your browser from the web server, and feedback on this new feature so far has been that this has greatly helps users that have a lot of Folders and Passwords in their navigation tree.

 

You can turn on Load on Demand under your own personal preferences, as per below screenshot:

 

 

 

***UPDATE 9th DECEMBER 2016*** 

 

I've put this update at the top of this post, as we've now released a new build of Passwordstate, Build 7817, which includes some optimizations for the navigation tree.  This is probably the most important piece of information in this thread and if you aren't on build 7817 or higher, we recommend upgrading if you've noticed performance issues. 

 

You should notice a significant difference in load times when launching Passwordstate, and improvements when working in the navigation tree if you upgrade to this build.  Below is a video demonstrating the improvements in this build, and please take note of the new search functionality and option in Preferences to make Passwordstate faster:)

 

 

 

Click Studios Base Line Testing and Performance Suggestions:

Firstly, we'll detail the sort of performance we see in our development environment, so you can compare to your own.

Recommended System Requirements

• Preferably Dual-Core 1.6Ghz or higher
• 2 GB Ram
• 100 MB of disk space for web install
• 50 MB of disk space for database (smaller initially), plus room for SQL backups. Allow for 10 MB of disk space per user per year
• Passwordstate will operate in a virtualised environment (Hyper-V or VMWare)

 

Expected Performance

• We use virtual machines in our environment, with the web server being on one virtual machine, and the database on another. Each machine only has one processor assigned to it, with a minimum of 2GB of memory
• Clicking between different Password Lists - 1.5 to 2 seconds
• Refreshing the browser screen (F5) - about 3 seconds on average
• Restarting IIS and refreshing the browser - about 7 seconds on average (restarting IIS is similar to rebooting your server)

 

Performance Suggestions

• If you are accessing your web server over a slow link, this will cause delays
• Certain Anti-Virus software installed on the Passwordstate Web Server or clients can also cause delays - as it scans HTTP requests and content. Possibly setting temporary exclusions in your AV software may help for the C:\inetpub\Passwordstate folder and all sub folders, and possibly the w3wp.exe process.  This isn't a long term fix and your AV vendor will need to resolve their issue.
• Normally the biggest contributor to slowness is lack of available memory on your web server. We recommend to keep at least 1GB of memory available at all times, and memory usage will fluctuate depending on how many concurrent user sessions there are on your web server
• You can turn of charts on the screen so these do not need to load. Each user can turn off the charts, or you can use a User Account Policy for this for multiple users at once - If you need help with this please log a support call to Click Studios
• Try and limit the number of records you display in the Passwords grid. Where possible, try and use paging and the search feature, as the more records you display, the more HTML rendering is required
• Some customers have seen poor performance when using various 'Desktop' based anti-virus solutions on their web servers. Some of these products are not intended for web servers, and you can temporarily disable to see if it makes any difference
• In Internet Information Services Manager, click on the Passwordstate web site, then on Compression and disable Dynamic Compress. Restart the web site after this
• In Internet Information Services Manager, open the 'Advanced Settings' for the Passwordstate Application Pool, and ensure Idle Time-out (Process Model) and Regular Time Interval (Recycling) are set to 0. If the application pool is recycled at any stage, this would cause the initial session to Passwordstate to be slow
• If using SQL Server Express, ensure AUTO_CLOSE is disabled for the Passwordstate database
• In Windows Server, ensure Indexing is disabled on the drives where SQL Server and Passwordstate are installed
• We've also had one customer which had almost 1000 Password Lists/Folders present in the Navigation Tree on the left hand side. This can cause performance issues, due the amount of HTML it needs to rendered - not only for the Navigation Tree itself, but also for all the images. Unfortunately there's not a lot we can do when there is this much HTML to render, and we worked with the customer to provide recommendations for reducing the amount of Password Lists displayed **Update - As of Build 7580, there is now an option under Preferences -> Home Page called "Hide all Password List/Folders in the Navigation Tree".  Setting this option and using the search feature will speed up the rendering of the page (Video below describes this in more detail)
• We've also had one instance of virtual machines with AMD processors causing performance issues, but we cannot confirm this ourselves
• If you RDP directly into your Passwordstate web server, what is the performance like then?  This will help isolate if there is an issue between the desktop computer and the Passwordstate web server
• Passwordstate installs with approximately 500 default Bad Passwords, but it is possible to import more into the system. The below table outlines the expected performance for different ranges of imported Bad Passwords:

          

 

 

 

Video of how to apply User Interface Optimizations

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Regards

Click Studios