When page loading is too slow in a Semarchy xDM application, bad performance could be related to :

SQL query processing time ( see Enable Logging in Semarchy xDM for reference on how to track and capture long-running queries )
lack of horsepower and RAM on the application server ( check RAM and CPU usage on the host, verify connection pool sizing vs number of users, and tomcat memory settings )
slow network

This article will focus on the latter.

Big files ?

When a semarchy form is loaded for the first time in the current session, the browser downloads a json file that describes the page layout. For complicated BoViews with multiple tabs and transitions, this json file could weigh 6 Mo or more. This can significantly increase page loading time if you have a low bandwidth and / or when the application server is far

Then what ?

The tomcat application server (as most application servers) can compress some of the resources used in a HTML page before transferring them over the network. There's a slight processing overhead to compress the files, but it's definitely worth it if network bandwidth is the main bottleneck.

There's a lot of structural redundancy in the average json file, making it a very good candidate for compression (you can expect more than 95 % reduction in size).

How can I monitor file tranfer duration ?

Google Chrome comes with a built-in troubleshooting tool (known as Developer Tools) that allows one to monitor the time taken to fetch files from the server to the client (the browser) :

Press Ctrl + Shift + I to show / hide it.
Make sure the Network tab is active / selected
Use the clear button to clear the network log and make sure the "Disable Cache" property is ticked
Refresh the page
Locate the semRootEO file and check its size and transfer duration
Select the file to see the current Content Type : it should be application/json

Step-by-step guide

Open the server.xml file with your favorite text editor (it's typically found in the tomcat_root/conf folder)
Locate the <Connector> element

Modify it by adding three compression-related properties as follows

	compression="on"
	compressionMinSize="4096"
	compressableMimeType="text/html,application/json"

Restart your tomcat server
Start developer tools in chrome, go to network tab, select the semRootEO file, and check the header to make sure the changes were applied : the content encoding should now be gzip

Warning

This is not a solution to all performance issues, and could be detrimental if you compress files that don't need to be compressed : watch your tresholds and don't compress javascript and image files

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