For all those who have jumped on the R12 bandwagon - how is it acting when you have more than one person configuring?  What's the response time like?  What about 2 people?  3 people?  Now that PDF export is fixed, this is our only hangup.  We currently have two separate URLs for snap environments because R11 would bog down so much if more than one person was in there at a time.  I'm hearing R12 is still having that issue.  Just wanted to circle back and check in with folks since there have been a few dot releases.  Thanks!!

Hi Jenny

We often have 4+ working and checking in.

Generally good, but performance score when doing check ins is often: go get a cup of tea.

Hey Jenny - 

At any given moment we have minimum 5 users with documents/reports checked out in Studio.  While currently we are having a bit of slowness due to cleanup we need to do, the vast majority of the time we are perfectly able to all work in the system without any slowness.  I will say, that we do tend to avoid checking in any work until the end of the business day to avoid possible issues with slowness particularly when we are checking in a difficult configuration.

If you have any questions, I'm always happy to chat!

-Molly

Hi Jenny, we have two projects running on one R12 environment.
Most of the time we work with 4-6 people. The performance was very poor until we changed some configurations that caused "long-running" threads. In general, it can be said that the more users, in other words workspaces, the slower the instance becomes. Regular "Update Workspace" helps in any case.
Running uploads in both projects in parallel causes problems also. In that case it is very helpful to check in all the uploaded data in the evening or have the STG calculation paused during the day.

Can't say we've had any major issues. In the early days it was a bit slow v12.3 but since we've moved on to v12.4 and .5 I've noticed a big improvement in performance in the Development environment and the whole application in general. It is more responsive and saving  model / data changes is quicker. 

@Francis Chinkwande - did you find any issues moving to 12.5? We're looking at upgrading this weekend & want to go in to it with our eyes wide open. 

The upgrade was recommended as we are constanting maxing out the memory capacity

We've had no issues so far, I think it's worth doing. We haven't upgraded all our components yet (due to month end) but we're looking forward to doing that next week. We've also managed to install the Performance Analyser component after the upgrade which will be very useful to us but still trying to get our heads around some of the data!

@Francis Chinkwande, may I ask if you have any documentation on how you installed the Performance Analyser? We also upgraded to 12.5.1 a few weeks ago, but I do not see this component you are referring to in your post.

@Julie Batty, we still have intermittent issues with 12.5.1 -- I would call it 'good days' and 'bad days'. Like many comments already alluded to, slowness happens when more than 2 users check out either tables / reports for configuration purposes or when we try to do a lot of changes in 2 different branches. The unpredictable part is when the nodes reset without us knowing. As long as Apptio support or CSM keeps us posted, it makes the experience more bearable. But we did experience slowness in 3 consecutive month end activities until we upgraded to 12.5.1

I may have found it, @Francis Chinkwande. Is this what you are referring to?

Hi Tony, I've only just seen your message, glad you managed to find it.

12.5.1 is much quicker, but some majpor issues still exist: e.g. deleting role versioned reports, Hotfix-Branches.

Thank you all SOOO much - SUPER helpful!!  And jotting down these tips as well!!

Going to echo some of the points mentioned above; have 3 people working in the project at one time and in general that is fine until something needs to calculate or load then we have major issues. The main cause is legacy issues over-running from our lift and shift from our R11 project - would recommend not doing this and allow the extra time for a rebuild - we're now looking to completely rebuild our project due to this reason.

One of my co-workers runs object heavy reporting which also slows down the project so we are looking to do these outside normal office hours to hopefully reduce the knock-on affect.

For the front-end we have some large multi-object reports which take time to load so hinders the performance for our users, so we're looking at reviewing our customised reports to make them less chunky and clunky.

Love the question Jenny, thanks for asking!

Earlier this year we consulted with our CSM to help calculations and slowness improve. The report he ran gave us a breakdown of what was causing slows in each calculation. I would reach out if you haven't already, to have your enviroment evaluated. They'll be able to easily identify improvements.

By just simply changing the project start and end dates to a shorter time frame, we saw improvement for calculations as well improvement of overall slowness.

We found some reports that were custom adhoc that we didn't really need and were creating bottlenecks for the calculations as well. So we removed them promptly.

We try not to have more than two branches open at a time with our smaller team of 4, to reduce issues as well.

Thanks for the branch tip @Daniel Swainston

Having branches in R12.5.1 is much better from a performance perspective than in the older Apptio versions. But I would recommend to have a maximum of two branches open, as already mentioned by @Daniel Swainston.

Thank you!!!!!

Jenny 

I will try to be nice on this thread!  

We have 3 people in Apptio at a time.   We have a slowness/ UI responsiveness already but if one person is working on larger calcs it will slow down the rest of us.   Like others we try to check in any changes until the end of the day because it slows down Dev tremendously.     I have been wanting to count all of the time we wait for dev UI to come back after a calc or report change and I would say we wait on average an hour a day on the system.    We have been working with Apptio support on our slowness but still experiencing it.   Keep me posted on how the upgrade goes!  

Thanks, Craig and will do - looks like that upgrade is a ways off yet, tho!

Thanks @Jenny Franklin for this question and everyone else for your candid and helpful responses.  I'm happy to hear that for most of you things have gotten much better and happy to hear the suggestions regarding working with your CSMs and Support to identify some of the things that are causing slowness.  We are continually working to improve our calc times.

Adding @Ed Hayman for visibility on this.  Good discussion here Ed,  sounds like we're doing better but still have work to do both on reducing calc times, and helping people identify ways to improve their project configuration that will reduce calc times.

Hi, I'm Stephen Atwell, the product Manager who owns performance of the R12 platform. This is an area we are continuing to look at, and continuously improve. Here are some things you my find helpful off the various comments.

1) In general, for the vast majority of our customers the performance of TBMAs making configuration changes is vastly improved over r11. This is an area we continue to look at, and there are still things that can happen in configurations that cause slowness. The main improvement in r12 here is impacts of multiple TBMAs on each other. The R12 architecture was built specifically to decrease impact of multiple TBMAs. If you have unacceptable performance in dev, reach out to support or your CSM and they should be able to help.

   If the slowness is primarily experienced only when a large number of TBMAs are logged into the system, R12 does support spreading multiple TBMAs out over multiple dedicated compute resource to further decrease their impact upon each other. This is currently manually configurable by Apptio if you contact support, but it is on our roadmap to make it automatic.

2) Dev calculations are a concept that exists in R12 that does not exist in R11. These calculations run basic validations, and prevent one TBMA from seeing another TBMA's changes, or modifying the same portion of the configuration as another TBMA until after they complete. Apptio is investigating optimizations that can decrease dev calculation times further.

3) Real-time performance: In general this is much better than in r11, HOWEVER there have been, and will continue to be optimizations in this area. One noticeable improvement is that prior to 12.5 expanding a report collection or table group within TBM studio would tend to take many seconds. The query that caused this was optimized, and if this is affecting your TBMA experience, upgrading to the latest GA release will likely help significantly.

4) Multi-object reporting does have additional calculation and reponse time improvements coming out in the 12.6 timeframe. However, 3+ object reporting performance, and 2+ object reporting performance when doing time aggregation (yearToDate, Annual, etc) will continue to have performance challenges for some configurations for the near term future. There are bigger ticket roadmap items we are looking at that should improve these.

Performance is something that Apptio takes seriously. We are continuously optimizing the platform, and fixing the performance issues that affect the widest groups of customers. The best way to improve your performance is typically to upgrade to the latest GA release of the Apptio platform.

Hope this helps!

@Christopher Funicelli @Archit Aryasri

Thank you for this prompt and detailed response @Stephen Atwell.  I know our customers appreciate the constant work we are doing to improve performance, and appreciate hearing directly from you some of the upcoming improvements and what they can do in the short term.

I've found the system response time in dev pretty good since the upgrade to R12. Because of the check-out check-in system, it's easy to determine if someone is already working with an object, and refreshing the workspace is usually fairly quick and easy. The most we've ever had working on a project at one time is two people, so I'm not sure if performance issues start arising after that. But, I don't think we've had any problems with it. I did notice that our project's calculation times increased after the upgrade, but not significantly.

We had some major performance issues when initially migrating from r11 but most of these were resolved and performance is generally good now. We're on 12.5 now. 

However, it's still not as good as r11 from an end-user perspective.. Running the two versions side by side makes it pretty obvious. For us, r11 reports would render in approx 3sec whereas r12 takes around 8sec to load - might not sound like a lot, but when users have to apply a couple of slicers or view a couple of different reports it starts to add up pretty quickly. 

We also notice poor performance when there's a calculation running in the background, so we try to do all our check-ins at the end of the day only so that the calculation doesn't affect the user-experience. Worth noting that our calculation time in r12 is significantly longer than r11 (probably 40%).

The other thing about the calculation is that it will automatically start once a check-in is completed and then queues subsequent check-ins - even if the following check-in is only a few minutes later. The first calculation completes (hours later), and then the subsequent check-in begins to calculate. This can be quite annoying as it ends up double calculating but you can manually cancel them to ensure only the latest check-in gets calculated. I believe a fix for this is coming in 12.6.

To be fair, we have CT, BoIT, DL, ITP, and Cloud modules with quite complex models, row-level security enabled, hundreds of datasets, millions of rows of data, lots of custom reports with very granular detail and trending, daily promotions to Prod over month-end, and 200+ active users. 

The updates from Apptio have made the performance noticeably better each time so we are usually pretty quick to take on upgrades when these are available. 

I guess what I'm saying is - don't wait for performance to be perfect before upgrading. It can always be improved. It's VERY usable at the moment and there are many other benefits to upgrading.

Hi Jenny,

Performance is often very poor when we work with more than one developer, especially in the afternoon (CEU timezone). The calculation screen appears quite often and can be there for a couple of minutes when uploading files with only 50 rows. R12 sometimes seems to "hang"; the background colour turns to light grey and later to dark grey. 

I know that the engineers are working on this issue and hopefully they can fix it soon.

When I am the only developer, the performance is better. 

Thanks Everyone for responding - this is so very helpful!!!!

Having read the responses here, I get a feeling that the performance experience is varying due to factors unknown to us at the moment. 

Ever since we go onto Apptio we have been seeing this problem from the very 3rd month. It is 15 months now and everytime I reported this issue I was told it is a network problem. We are 2 of us working at the same time. However, the peculiar thing is, after a recent upgrade it was settled for the past 4 weeks or so, but just 3 days back, it has resurfaced. I hope there can be an end to it.

Hello Suresh, I do think it varies by customer.  As Stephen and some others mentioned, there are things that can be reviewed in your project to determine whether there are optimization hat could be made on your project or your data that could improve the speed.  Have you taken any of those steps?  If not, please do contact Support and ask about optimization. They may also ask you which browser you are using. Sometimes using a different browser can also improve performance if you have that option.  In my personal experience with multiple students working in the same training environment, my students using chrome tend to have the fastest performance. 

That said, I know that other traffic, backups, security pushes on your network could affect the performance as well.  

Hi Debbie,

Yes we had done that and optimized it which cut down the calculation times by half. It was all well until 3 days back. We will raise a support case anyhow as it was almost unsuable.

Hi Suresh, wow!  By half that's fantastic! 

Hopefully the situation the other day was just an anomaly.  Support may not be able to track a slowness incident that is no longer happening, but it's worth trying, especially if you've recorded the time it was happening accurately.

We have around 8-10+ different people that will be in and out of our project between our internal team and Apptio resources, and that's just those working in the system, not our end users. Our system works as intended the majority of the time but what will happen occasionally, (a couple times a week) the system will hang up for most everyone and resolve all at the same time. After looking through these suggestions, we'll try to see if any of these will help improve our system's response times.