Improve End User Experience under poor network by using GZIP and Async function in Maximo

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Recently we got a customer complained some UI interactions in Maximo 75 are too slow. We went to the customer's lab and did some tests, with HttpWatch/Firebug, we found the slow page response time is most from the response content receiving, not from the server side. In the customer scenario, they used signature option for most of the incidents in 'INCIDENT' application, and then they got a big size (more than 400 KB) of response content when switching the records. Through their poor network, the response content receiving time is exceed more than 3 sec, and the customer feel it's too slow and it hurt their user experience.

Depending on the circumstances, we considered to use Maximo GZIP function to reduce the response content size to improve the data receiving time. With Gzip enabled, the response content size is compressed to about 20 KB from original 400 KB, also, the page response time is improved from over 3 sec to under 500 ms.

So if you are experienced in slow page response time under poor network, you can try to enable GZIP in Maximo to see if any improvements. Although with GZIP enabled in Maximo, we could got a little overhead in application server, but it would improve end user efficiency in most cases.

And the second customer probelm is they feel it's boring during opening a new ticket in Maximo, each time there would be a small pause when inputting a value in a text box. As in Maximo, every time you typed in a text box, a synchronise request would be sent to the server in default way, so the end user would feel a little pause in the UI, especially under poor network. But since Maximo 75, there is a new way to process these requests in asynchronous way, and it would improve the end user efficiency by reducing these requests. To learn more, please go to here.