[bromcom] Bromcom Performance

[Strawdog]

....and it's flaky again \o/

[Bromcom_Support_2]

....and it's flaky again \o/

 

Hi Strawdog

 

There was an issue with one server this morning which affected a handful of Schools. We will be performing maintenance on that server tonight to avoid any further issues occurring.

 

 

Apologies again and thank you for your understanding.

 

Kind regards,

Bromcom Support.

[Ditto]

Although not really applicable in this case, it does remind me of Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Has the impact of the monitoring/logging invalidated the data you have collected? What is the challenge you are trying to resolve?

[m_m]

Does anyone else experience slowness between 8.30 & 9.15am with Bromcom. Have complaints from across the MAT of registers taking minutes to load and just general slowness in the mornings. Trying to work out if it's our network or Bromcom. Never had these issues with our previous MIS.

[Strawdog]

It's not anywhere near as bad as it has been but yes we frequently see poor performance at the start of the day, the platform seems to struggle with the mass of logons and registers all being loaded around the same time by their entire UK customer base.

[Theblacksheep]

Does anyone else experience slowness between 8.30 & 9.15am with Bromcom. Have complaints from across the MAT of registers taking minutes to load and just general slowness in the mornings. Trying to work out if it's our network or Bromcom. Never had these issues with our previous MIS.

 

Yes, it's Bromcom. Morning performance is still an issue.

[Ditto]

Yes, it's Bromcom. Morning performance is still an issue.

Not a Bromcom user, but the performance issue does seem to be cropping up a fair bit. I see from an early thread some monitoring was going on - anyone know the results of those? Generally, identifying the problem first is a requirement to resolving the issue, so those results could be key.

[noelmm]

We have had several reports of staff not being able to log a behaviour event through the register, the page just hangs. We reported something similar a few weeks ago to Bromcom and the problem seemed to go away for couple of weeks. The whole system now just seems slow.

[rogerdnixon]

Just a heads up on yesterday - we are on Securly filtering and I had to raise a ticket as Bromcom pages did not load correctly on their SMARTPac filtering. Turning out Securly had to all cdn.jsdelivr.net in the backend. Once that was done all was fine. did not impact Chromebook users on extension filtering.

[Strawdog]

Just a heads up on yesterday - we are on Securly filtering and I had to raise a ticket as Bromcom pages did not load correctly on their SMARTPac filtering. Turning out Securly had to all cdn.jsdelivr.net in the backend. Once that was done all was fine. did not impact Chromebook users on extension filtering.

 

We already whitelist that for staff, along with a bunch of others that Bromcom relies on (see below), but it was still slow for us this morning.

 

*.mouseflow.com

*.bromcomcloud.com

*.fontawesome.com

*.walkme.com

*.getbeamer.com

*.cloudflare.com

[simpsonj]

If it's slow for an individual user, I have found that clearing the browser cache has improved performance.

[kennysarmy]

Just a heads up on yesterday - we are on Securly filtering and I had to raise a ticket as Bromcom pages did not load correctly on their SMARTPac filtering. Turning out Securly had to all cdn.jsdelivr.net in the backend. Once that was done all was fine. did not impact Chromebook users on extension filtering.

 

I'm on Securly at one site, when I try to add in "cdn.jsdelivr.net" I get the message "Adding this site to the Staff Policy Allow list is strongly discouraged. It should already be accessible on your network. Questions?" - so I guess all should be good.

[rogerdnixon]

Yes - they added it in the backend for all users yesterday when I noticed the issue yesterday.

[Strawdog]

We're seeing very slow loading times when accessing student information pages this morning - assessment, staff, cover, etc. all load okay (it's not the quickest but those pages are at least usable).

 

7 ahead of me in the queue to get through to the helpdesk, usually indicates it's not just us suffering

Edited November 30, 2022 by Strawdog

[Strawdog]

30mins on hold, made it to 4th in the queue :\

[supportman]

I had a good meeting with the CTO of Bromcom last week.

I urge you all to fill in the feedback surveys they send out to help promote the case for speed improvements.

They do listen and are working in the background to improve this.

 

The topics we covered included:

 

• - Slowness between 8:30 to 9:30am
  
• - Lazy loading of large lists
  
• - Navigation speed improvements such as MCAS >> Accounts >> Parent searches
  
• - Speed of Widgets on home screen
  
• - The effect of 3rd party apps on Bromcom performance
  
• - Site speed page monitoring and alerts
  
• - Improvements in web lesson registration entry
  

 

Anyway, hopefully I've done my bit.

 

I'm a web developer myself, so understand the limitations of frameworks, databases, dependencies and the battle between features vs speed.

But there are clearly many improvements that need to be made as Bromcom scales and gets more customers.

Edited November 30, 2022 by supportman

[Strawdog]

Each school/MAT's databases should be siloed so scaling shouldn't be an issue if they've enough grunt to handle the processing and we've never previously had such poor performance as we've had on and off ever since September - for me it seems they've either fundamentally broken something, aren't managing/policing load appropriately (blocking/terminating malformed reports or queries generating excessive load) or have cheaped out on infrastructure.

 

I take your point that systems this large and complex aren't simple to get right but schools pay lots for this service - how Bromcom make the service work isn't our concern, that it works is.

[Ditto]

Each school/MAT's databases should be siloed

 

 

Progresso as it was known implemented database sharding years ago which protected against really bad DB queries.

[Theblacksheep]

I had a good meeting with the CTO of Bromcom last week.

I urge you all to fill in the feedback surveys they send out to help promote the case for speed improvements.

.

 

This form is closed.

[Ditto]

This form is closed.

Which if you click on 'Technical details' it says "Session id: b003baba-5909-4eaf-937d-cb69e21ea9e9, Correlation id: 4c5f37ac-8ed7-4cfa-9fa7-40416be7b6ad" - classic MS error reporting

[supportman]

Multiple reports of teachers not being able to log in this morning.

 

Teacher app seems to work ok though as a temporary solution

[Brax]

Multiple reports of teachers not being able to log in this morning.

 

Teacher app seems to work ok though as a temporary solution

Single Sign On seems to work for us. Worth a try if you're all struggling this morning.

[Strawdog]

Multiple reports of teachers not being able to log in this morning.

 

Teacher app seems to work ok though as a temporary solution

 

Same here - some staff have reported being able to login with some browsers but not others but it generally seems pretty wonky.

[localzuk]

They've got an incident listed on their status site now - https://status.bromcomcloud.com/

[supportman]

Known "Minor" issue apparently. lol

 

Minor incident: Some users unable to login | Bromcom Cloud Services Status

 

And

 

Bromcom logging random people out? (bromcomcloud.com)