There are a number of factors that can affect the performance of Tracker and these are explored in this article along with actions you can take to address these.
These include:
- Internet Speeds
- Computer or Browser Specification
- Browser Data or Settings
- Tracker Settings
- Big Data Requests
- If all else fails...
Internet Speeds
It may seem obvious but internet speeds are critical to a good experience.
Unlike most websites which are static pages, Tracker is highly dynamic so comparing performance against news websites etc is not a fair benchmark.
Depending on the type of connection you have, internet speeds can fluctuate, especially at busier times of the day. ADSL broadband for example stands for "Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line" which is shared with other businesses or homes in your area. It's performance will therefore slow at peak times of usage.
Dedicated DSL or fibre connections offer faster speeds and more stability so is always preferred when using SaaS based services such as Tracker.
You can test your internet speeds at any time of the day to monitor how this may be fluctuating using online tools such as https://www.speedtest.net and we would recommend at least 10Mbps for both Download and Upload speeds.
Example of www.speedtest.net performance check:
Once the test completes, check your download and upload speeds and if these drop below the recommended level, contact your internet provider to see how this can be improved.
The more users you have in your office, the more bandwidth you will typically require so if your team is more than 10 users, you should be seeing an additional 0.5 Mbps to 1Mbps per additional user ideally.
Proxy Servers
Another key limitation for internal office networks is "Proxy Servers". These marshal internet traffic in and out of the company network which can cause major bottlenecks in perceived speeds.
Seek clarification from your internal IT team if this is the case and ensure they "whitelist" Tracker's domain traffic so that this is excluded from marshalling. The domain will be *.tracker-rms.com/*
Computer or Browser Specification
There are many mainstream browsers around today and some are better than other at managing complex websites such as Tracker.
We pledge to support the following browsers as standard including the current latest version and one version prior.
- Google Chrome
- Microsoft Edge (Chromium version recommended)
- Apple Safari
- Firefox
Due to the nature of Tracker and our use of the latest browser techniques to enhance the user experience, we cannot guarantee support for older or other independant browsers (such as Internet Explorer or Opera) so although you may find no problems, we cannot offer support for non-mainstream browser issues.
If your computer is old or your browser is out of date, this can also have a detrimental effect on your browsing experience.
We would recommend the following specification:
- Windows 10 PC or above
- MacOS 10 14 or above
- iPad, iPhone iOS 14.0 or equivalent Android smart device or above
- Chrome browser (available at https://www.google.com/chrome/)
- Microsoft Edge Chromium browser (available at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge)
- Firefox (available at https://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/new/)
Browser Data or Settings
Browsers are very complex bits of software these days and sometimes they get issues around things like cache or cookies.
We would recommend these steps:
- Clear your browser's cache and cookies (please see https://www.wikihow.com/Clear-Cache-and-Cookies)
- Close all instances of your browser (all tabs and all windows if you have multiple open)
- Restart your browser
- Logon again at https://my.tracker-rms.com/Account/Login
Tracker Settings
There is a lot of flexiblity within Tracker to adjust performance.
For example, we can display 15, 25 or 50 items in the main lists. Obviously the more items you list, the more Tracker needs to do to create those lists on screen and populate one of many dymanic fields you may be displaying such as "Last Activity" or "Next Activity".
If you want to discuss these options with Client Support then please email clientsupport@tracker-rms.com and they will check your settings for you and make any recommendations.
Big Data Requests
There may be some situatons where things will genuinely take a long time to load,m and require patience.
We hold a lot of data on your business and in areas such as reporting, building large complex reports with lots of data may take time to appear on page due to the sheer amount of information we need to render in the web page.
If you are reporting a lot of data at a granular level and the report has 5,000 rows, it's going to take longer that 2 seconds to typically load. This is not necessarily a reflection on how quickly Tracker can retrieve the data for your report, but the time it takes to pass the content back to the browser page so you can view it.
We can assist you in making changes to such things as reports by breaking them down into smaller, faster reports or applying additional filters that will improve performance. Please speak to Client Support for assistance.
If all else fails...
If, having reviewed and actioned the above recommendations you are still seeing performance issues, there may be a legitimate issue we need to investigate for you.
Please follow these instructions in this instance so that we can best support you:
- Save a copy of your www.speedtest.net report so we can vaildate this for you (a screen shot is fine)
- Ideally we would like a short video recording of your experience as this tells us a lot about what areas may have issues and what pages you were in at the time. There are many free screen recording tools out there such as Vidyard (https://www.vidyard.com/) you can use to record the browser screen
- Logon to the Tracker Support Portal at http://support.tracker-rms.com/ and raise a new ticket, attaching the screenshot and the link to you video
- Or email the above screenshot and link to your video to clientsupport@tracker-rms.com
We will then check the speeds from our side and if we are able to recreate the issue, investigate as a matter of urgency.