Why are my artifacts loading so slowly in RRC?

Why are my artifacts loading so slowly in RRC?

This situation is to help discover the possibilities in improving the load time of the actual RRC artifacts, which can have several different facets contributing to the overall performance. Note that it may take investigation in several iterations and several solutions working together to resolve this issue.

Topics such as collections, reviews, and other RRC functions are not covered directly in this situation.

If you are familiar with Artifacts skip to the InitialAssessment.

Background on Artifacts and loading

• Artifact: Artifact is a general term for the lowest level of objects that are displayed in the Project Explorer and a particular project Artifacts page in RRC.
• Artifact type: An artifact type is a class of objects that is particular to a requirement definition technique.
  • Text artifact type example: glossary
  • Rich text artifact type examples: documents, requirements, use cases, actors.
  • Graphical artifact type example: business process diagram, user interface sketch, user interface sketch part, screen flow, storyboard, use-case diagram
• Artifact template: the content, attribute groups, and outgoing links of an artifact. For rich-text artifact types, such as documents, requirements, use cases, and actors, the template also includes embedded images and text formatting. The template does not include tags, comments, and incoming links.

Within the context of RRC 4.0, the type, content, comments, and history will determine how much information that will be maintained for a particular artifact.

Artifacts can be embedded in other artifacts.

Not all of the information that is associated with an artifact is tied to the artifact. The artifact can be grouped in a collection, from which reviews are conducted. In addition, the artifact can have links and be linked to from another artifact.

Initial Assessment

After you have completed the Initial Troubleshooting, the next step is RRC and artifact specific assessments.

Load status

• Did the Artifact load eventually?
  • If the artifact didn't load, did the page load? Was there an HTTP error transmitted?
• Is the problem with editing, viewing, or both?

Scope

• Is it only artifacts? Specific artifacts types?
• If you have other applications, are they slow to load work items, tests, etc?
• If the issues is not contained to artifacts, investigate if the entire RRC system has issues.
• Has the server been renamed? Has the database, network, or other topology information been changed?

Initial load of artifacts

• If the problem is only on an initial load, is it the first user or for every user?

Intermittent issues with artifacts

Specific artifacts

• If there are specific artifacts that have this issue, discover if they have a relationship.
  • Are they in the same project?
  • Are they of the same type? Same template?
  • Do they have the same amount and types of links and data? Tags? Folder depth?
  • Were they copies of the same artifact?
  • Were they renamed?
  • Do they have a lot of comments?
  • Are they part of a collection? Is there a review?
  • Were they all migrated from a specific version?
  • Were they created from an import or copy/paste of a rich text document? Imported as ReqIF?
  • How many files are uploaded?
  • How many attributes and of what type?
  • Do they all contain or relate a specific type of media such as png format?
• Create a new Artifact that would be considered identical to the Artifact that is slow. Is it loading in the same speed?
• Create a new minimally sized Artifact. Is it loading in the same speed as the slow and identical Artifacts?

In-depth investigations

For a specific artifact having slow load times, analysis of the data being loaded to the browser to show the artifact can be attained by using a browser http viewer. The in-depth investigation should concentrate on the load times, size, and frequency related to the creation of the artifact view from the data that represents that artifact provided by the RRC application.

Image loading

Areas of concern include: Images that are of higher resolution than needed and image formats that are not compressed, such as tif and bmp. Using an HTTP resource load viewing tool, in this case the developer tool in Chrome, the retrieval of an RRC artifact was performed.

Using the tool, look for loads of specific resources (images) that take a long time.

The specfiic image can be investigated as an individual resource

This resource can then be updated with a higher compression or different format to reduce the load time to the browser.

Possible causes and solutions

The RRC server is slow.

• The channel to the artifact is the connection through the network, through the application server, to the RRC application and collecting from the back end database through the application application server and the rest of the network topology back to the user. This channel needs to be optimized to provide the best performance, which relies on each part being aligned with the whole system. See the RRC 4.0 tuning guide article for more information.
• Delete all unused and undesired archived projects (and artifacts, etc thereby associated with unneeded overhead).
• If the RRC server or JTS server was recently upgraded, it is possible that a new index needs to be created. Running a reindex can correct this situation. See technote 1620879 for more information.

The client interface is slow.

• If the browser itself is determined to be the problem, there are several avenues to pursue for improving the current browser performance and investigation into using a different browser
  • For browser related improvements to performance, and using a different browser see https://jazz.net/wiki/bin/view/Deployment/BrowserPerformance
• If the Browser Add-on is determined to be the problem, there are a few options.
  • Make sure the Browser Add-on is loading. To manually install review Technote 1587987
  • Review the browser plugin information at the RM browser add-on article.
  • Make sure that the Browser Add-on doesn't have errors by reviewing the browser add-on error log.
  • Change the browser, JRE, and/or supporting operating system to better support the browser add-on.
• client OS and environment
• network to server

There is too much data in the artifact.

• There is the possibility that the artifact has simply been created or manipulated to the point where the data it contains is too large to be transmitted and loaded in the expected time. This can be measured against a new artifact.
• If the artifact is a composite image, determine if it needs to continue being a composite image based on state and possible part changes.
• If an artifact is not a composite, determine if the artifact is created in the model correctly, or if it should be broken down further into component parts.
• Find the base artifact with the large data size and determine what can be done to reduce the data.
  • upload a new version of an image or other media with a lower resolution, higher compression, raster to vector, or different format (TIF to JPG for example)
  • edit the rich text and manually remove any extraneous data
• Use RRC in the context of creating and managing requirements. For attachments not needed to convey the requirements, consider using a different repository source and linking.

It never loads

• If you have just migrated from Requisite Pro to Requirements Composer, it may be related to a few caching or load needs.
  • To improve the server performance, the project type system feed is cached. Sometimes, the feed is not refreshed to include all of the types that were created during the migration of a Rational Requisite Pro project. As a result, the web client hangs and eventually causes the browser to display a message to stop the script. See Workaround: Artifacts not shown following migration of IBM Rational Requisite Pro project for more information.
  • Importing a Requisite Pro Project that was integrated with Rational Requirements Composer requires a manual refresh prior to seeing changes. See Article 947

Related topics: None

External links:

• RRC features and artifact type descriptors
• Infocenter

Additional contributors: None