One of the three main areas contributing to end-to-end response time is the Client Time. A part of the time spent on the client is the so-called rendering time, during which the browser loads files, executes JavaScript and renders the screen.
Influences on rendering time
There are several different factors that can influence the rendering time:
- The size of the screen – Very simple, but easily overlooked: the more elements (incl. small things like fields, text elements etc.) are on the screen, the more time is required to load and render them. This includes both standard elements, as well as objects added via customization or personalization.
- Mashups – Depending on the various elements that can be included via mashups, the rendering time could also change significantly.
- Client CPU and Hardware – Modern browsers require a significant amount of CPU power and memory. Furthermore, additional applications could be running on the PC of the user and occupy system resources. You can find the minimum system requirements for SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer (C4C) here: SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer System and Software Requirements
- Virtualization – Clients running in a virtualized environment could not have access to enough resources for the application.
- Operating System and Web Browser – Different Operating Systems and Web Browsers can also show differences in rendering performance.
Examples for issues in rendering time
High rendering times could for example be caused by a slow (hard-) disk access on your system. As a browser-based SaaS (Solution as a Service) application, C4C relies on the browser cache to store static content (not business data). This content includes files like JavaScript, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and images. These files are stored in the cache, so they don’t need to be sent by the server via the network each time. However, if the disk system is slow for some reason, reading these files would also take more time. Possible reasons for a slow disk access could – amongst others – be issues with a virtual machine setup or other programs running in the background, like anti-virus scans (which could not only block system resources, but even start to scan the files that are required for the page).
How to identify high rendering time?
If you suspect a certain step (or all interactions) to be slow, it might be time to take a network trace with the built-in browser developer tools (similar tools available both in Chrome and IE). See the following video for more details on how to do that:
How to take HTTP traces for performance troubleshooting using Google Chrome/MS IE Dev Tool
