Diagnosing performance issues with hosted sites

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This page gives information about how to troubleshoot performance issues for hosted Flow Production Tracking sites. For urgent issues that requires immediate support, please open a ticket on Flow Production Tracking Support.

Types of performance issues

It can be challenging to identify the cause of a slow Flow Production Tracking site since there can be many variables that contribute to performance. In order to help our support team diagnose, we need to understand where you are experiencing issues. Common areas where users may experience slowness include:

  1. Loading data across the whole of Flow Production Tracking: Where navigating across all areas of the UI seems slow.
  2. Loading specific pages in Flow Production Tracking: Where a single page or pages are noticeably slower to load than the rest.
  3. Playing back media in the Overlay Player or Screening Room: Where streaming media takes a long time buffer or you encounter stuttering during playback.
  4. Uploading and transcoding of media: Where uploading versions and media to Flow Production Tracking takes a long time or there is increased time between when the Version is uploaded and the transcoding is complete.
  5. Slowdowns at a specific time of the day: Where Flow Production Tracking performance across any of the above areas is noticeably slow during certain time periods, on a consistent basis, every day.
  6. Network wide issues that are not related to Flow Production Tracking: Where one of our services is experiencing network or connectivity issues which affects the Flow Production Tracking service.

As a first step, identify which of the above areas you are seeing slowness in, or any other areas not listed above. Then, you can run some recommended tests (outlined below) and send the relevant results to our support team.

What are 503 errors?

If more requests are made than the system can process, the request queue fills up and eventually, requests are rejected. For the end users, this is reflected by a 503 error, misleadingly letting users think the site is in maintenance. Should you encounter these, please contact support as soon as possible.

Diagnosing issues

The guide below will help you validate where you are seeing performance issues across Flow Production Tracking and help you provide our support team with the most relevant information.

Step 1: Validate Flow Production Tracking outages

The first step is to validate that Flow Production Tracking is not undergoing any maintenance, or reported downtime. You can check this via the Flow Production Tracking status page . If all systems are reporting as operational, then continue to the next step. Otherwise, you can read a report on the type of incident.

Flow Production Tracking status page

Step 2: Identify latency to the closest AWS Region Flow Production Tracking services

Use the The Connection Health Check website available from AWS to check that all services that use Amazon WorkSpace are operational.

Step 3: Test Your Connection

The Test Your Connection tool will analyze the health of the connection from your location to the Flow Production Tracking servers. These tests ensure that your devices and systems can establish and maintain proper communication with the Flow Production Tracking services.

Test Your Connection

Results from the test can be used for troubleshooting your network connection.

Learn more about testing your connection here.

Step 4: Identify specific problem areas

Slowness on specific pages

Troubleshoot Page Performance with the Page Performance Tool here.

Individual pages can often perform slower if they haven’t been optimized properly. Once a problematic page has been identified, you can use our guide on optimizing filters and scripts to make your pages faster.

Using the debug console

A browser's debug console can help identify which processes might be slowing down a page. To run this test in Chrome:

  1. Go to View > Developer > Javascript console.
  2. Select the Network tab, on the far left of the UI.
  3. Navigate to one of the slow pages.
    • You will see a number of calls to the server begin to appear. There may be one (or more) taking a very long time.
  4. Click the offenders, and then expand the height of the frame and either include that in your video, or take a screenshot of the header information and send it to us.

Step 5: Validate your tools versions

We often release new versions of our tools, APIs and integrations that contain performance improvement. Make sure your tools are at the latest version, and update as often as possible.
Desktop SG Desktop
Create SG Create
APIs Python - Rest

Slowness when playing back media

If media is buffering or running slowly in the Overlay Player or Screening Room, then you can try the following test that accesses the media from S3 directly:

  1. Open up your browser’s debugger.

  2. Go to the Network tab.

  3. Begin playback of a version in the Overlay Player.

    • You will notice a load of calls being made, with one of them being the actual media file. If you inspect it you’ll get a direct S3 link to that piece of media.

  4. Copy that link and paste it into your browser, which should play the media directly.

Using this link essentially bypasses the Flow Production Tracking Overlay Player and talks to the server directly. If speeds are vastly different when playing off the server directly, then something in Flow Production Tracking could be slowing it down, but if speeds are more or less the same then it could be something on the network interfering.

Mobile network test

Since Flow Production Tracking doesn’t require a powerful connection to run smoothly, it can be run from a mobile data network. If your network allows for it, you can tether to a mobile 4G data network temporarily on a machine, and try running the Overlay Player on there.

Slowness when uploading and transcoding media

The first thing to validate is that your pure upload bandwidth speed is good. The results of the speed test above can be used to determine this. It is important to understand that if you have a 1 MBPS upload bandwidth, it will take about 14 minutes to upload a 100 MB file.

If you are experiencing slowness when transcoding media, take a look at the Site Activity Monitor (SAM) Transcoder wait time. A peak in wait time (over 5 minutes) can indicate an issue with the number of jobs submitted to the transcoder, or with the size of the media payload sent for transcoding. Use the graphs Jobs submitted per user and Uploaded media to troubleshoot the issue.

If you are experiencing slowness when uploading media, it is important for our team to understand what type of media you are trying to upload. If you can, when submitting a support ticket, please include the specifications of the file you are trying to upload:

  1. Frame size
  2. Codec and container
  3. Frame rate
  4. File size in MB

If the problem persists, you can supply the problematic file to our support team to investigate for you.

Slowness reported at certain times of the day

While the above sections will help us narrow down where slowness might be coming from, understanding if it happens at a certain time of day can help us understand what process might be causing this.

Things to look out for include:

Please include this information to our support team to investigate.

Visit the Site Activity Monitor (SAM)

The Flow Production Tracking Site Activity Monitor (SAM) is a place where Flow Production Tracking Administrators can visit to see high-level activity on Flow Production Tracking sites and gain insight for troubleshooting. There are several ways in which the Site Activity Monitor can be used, including:

Learn more about the Site Activity Monitor here.

Analyze and Optimize Page Performance on Grid Pages

To investigate, troubleshoot and optimize page performance, you can use the Analyze Page Performance tool on grid pages. Learn more about this tool here.

Parent page: Troubleshooting Hosted Sites

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