DropTime Best Tips for Speed
Using these tips can SIGNIFICANTLY speed up your DropTime experience specifically in the Schedule area (Daily, Weekly, and Monthly views), where loading the calendar can be slow in certain situations. Here we give you a few important points that you should know about how DropTime processes the information here that will keep you moving fast.
The Two Significant Factors for Performance
THE NUMBER OF DISPACTHES IN VIEW: The most important factor in page load speed is the number of dispatches that you are viewing (i.e., that you are requesting to view via your filters, # of weeks / date range, etc.) So the goal is to REQUEST ONLY THE DISPATCHES YOU NEED TO VIEW/ EDIT FOR THE MOMENT.
THE NUMBER OF CATEGORY ITEMS IN YOUR ACCOUNT: Another factor is the number of category items in your company account. That means the count of all types of items taken together, including mixes, phases, jobs, customers, etc. This is regardless of whether they show up attached to dispatches in your view or not; simply their existence in your company account, even if removed (which does not remove from the backend database) drags the system. When these numbers get into the thousands the slowdown is significant. This issue can currently be helped a lot in many cases via purging unused items (which you can request of our support team and DOES remove items no longer in use from the backend database). However we plan to improve the efficiency of the software within the next year so that this may no longer be a significant factor in schedule load time.
The Speed Formula
The speed formula is a general approximation of how long it takes to load a page in the Schedule based on these two main factors. There are unusual situations where this formula may not apply well, and we are making a number of assumptions, such as the performance of your end user device, your internet speed, that sorting is typical, etc. It also does not include the initial entry into the Schedule itself (from another page). Understanding that, we feel that this formula is still generally a good benchmark for what to expect. Please note that this formula applies to DropTime as it has been enhanced today, not before we applied multiple improvements to efficiency over the summer of 2022.
The approximate speed formula is: Schedule page load time = (7 ms * # of dispatches in view) + (0.3 ms * # of category items) + 2,500 ms
EXAMPLE 1: Viewing 100 dispatches with 500 category items in the company account will take about..
(7ms * 100) + (0.3 ms * 500) + 2,500 ms
= 700 ms + 150 ms + 2,500 ms
= 3,350 ms
= 3.4 seconds
EXAMPLE 2: Viewing 300 dispatches with 1,000 category items in the company account will take about..
(7ms * 300) + (0.3 ms * 1,000) + 2,500 ms
= 2,100 ms + 300 ms + 2,500 ms
= 4,900 ms
= 4.9 seconds
EXAMPLE 3: Viewing 3,000 dispatches with 6,000 category items in the company account will take about..
(7ms * 3,000) + (0.3 ms * 6,000) + 2,500 ms
= 21,000 ms + 1,800 ms + 2,500 ms
= 25,300 ms
= 25.3 seconds
TIPS
#1 Use the filter to view a smaller number of time blocks (in the hundreds, not thousands) if possible.
Using your filter and/or choosing a smaller number of weeks (in Weekly View), you can pull only the dispatches you need at the moment from DropTime. If it is in the hundreds you should see times like in Example 1 above. If it is in the thousands you will see times like in Example 3 above.
Also when you first login to DropTime, your Default View will be in place, which includes a pre-set filter and # of weeks in view, etc. When you enter the Schedule, if this Default View is requesting thousands of dispatches, you may want to change it to contain a filter that reduces that to only a few hundred or less. For help with this see our help documentation about Views, or contact support@droptime.net. This can dramatically speed up your entry into the Schedule.
From there, use your filter to get only the dispatches you need at the moment to view or edit.
#2 Request a purge from our support team
If you have a large number of category items (as mentioned above) in your company account, you may benefit from a purge of unused category items. In this case, contact support@droptime.net to see if a purge would help. Our support team can get an accurate count for the number of category items in your system, and if a purge might help we can schedule one for you (requires some downtime for your account). Normally this requires first removing historical dispatches from a given past date backwards, and then removing the unused category items (as there should be more after the dispatch purge that are unused by the remaining dispatches).
We expect that within the next year large numbers of category items will no longer affect performance significantly, due to performance updates on our roadmap that are not yet implemented/available.
#3 Turn off the crew double scheduling alert if not using it.
You can access this by clicking the binoculars icon in the top right, and then click Edit Current View.
UNCHECK “Show double scheduling alert”
If there are lots of double scheduling conflicts and you are using this option, the schedule page load can be dramatically slowed down. But if you use or want to use this feature, as long as you have minimal conflicts (less than 20), there should be no significant impact on performance and we recommend you leave it on.