Optimizing Page Load Times in Open OnDemand

[adrianmalecki]

Hi,

I’ve been experiencing some performance issues with my Open OnDemand (OOD) instance, and I’m hoping to get some advice or insights from the community.

Current Situation:

• My application currently loads pages with an average time of 5-6 seconds. Initially, it was even slower, often taking between 20-30 seconds. (screens below).
  

  

• One of the major improvements I noticed was when I replaced small images with Font Awesome icons (fa-awesome). This change reduced the load time from the initial 20-30 seconds to the current 5-6 seconds (see Screen 2 for load times with fa-awesome). However, I’m still concerned that 5-6 seconds for page reloads might be too long.
  

  

• Another issue is in the “My Interactive Sessions” tab. If I have many completed sessions, the load time for this tab can take several dozen seconds (see Screen 3). When I remove the completed sessions, the load time drops to the same 5-10 seconds (see Screen 4).
  

  

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Additional Information:

• My system resources are adequate, and the VM does not show high usage.
• My internet connection is fast and should not be the bottleneck.
• SELinux is disabled.

Questions:

1. Is there any way to speed up the application further? Is 5 seconds for page reloads considered optimal? If it is, why does adding small images cause such a significant delay?
2. Is there a way to automatically delete completed sessions without affecting user files? I found this thread: Deleting Old Session Data, but I’m concerned that the method discussed might also delete user files, whereas I only want to remove the completed sessions from the OOD interface. On the session card, it says, “For debugging purposes, this card will be retained for 7 more days” – is it possible to change this period to something shorter, like 24 hours?

Any advice or recommendations would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

[jeff.ohrstrom]

For #2 there’s OOD_BC_CARD_TIME environment variable that defaults to 7. So you can change that to 1 for deleting cards older than 1 day. But I don’t think keeping the cards is holding anything up. The only thing I can think here is a card that says the job is still active, the system has to query for that job to find that it’s completed. Once we know a job is completed, we stop querying for it. So having the cards there shouldn’t be an issue, because we shouldn’t be querying for it.

As to #1, I’d ask what version you’re on? I think at some point we fixed that image caching issue.

You can see from this example - if my browser’s allowed to cache the images it will. This is on 3.1.7 but I feel like we fixed that some time ago.

[adrianmalecki]

Thank you for your response, and I apologize for not replying sooner.

I’m using the latest version of Open OnDemand 3.1.7, so something must be wrong. Could you advise me on what I should check or where to look for errors to diagnose why the images are not caching correctly? Could the caching issue also be causing the long page reload times? I’m also wondering what the optimal page load time should be in OOD and whether my current times (5-6 seconds) are normal or if they can be improved.

[jeff.ohrstrom]

Caching should be happening on your browser. When you open dev tools I think it’s default is to disable the cache - so you’d have to toggle that. But I believe that’s only when the dev tools are open. Seems like it should cache automatically when dev tools is not open.

As to the initial page loads - there isn’t a whole lot you can do. One thing that come to mind are using form.yml files instead of form.yml.erb (though sometimes you really need the ERB).