Service now "Freezing" & forced to refresh web page

[Tommy22]

Since January 2018, our ApHelpDesk team has been experiencing freezing. This happens when we are working on a case and typing up our emails in the comment box to send to our vendors. This usually happens after working on about 10 cases and we are forced to refresh the entire page. None of the drop down arrows, post, update, update and stay buttons would work. I know that our current session would expire if we leave for 30 minutes and come back, but this happens when i have been working on cases for 2-3 hours without a break. I am using windows 10. 

Hoping for some help. Thanks! 

[Scott Jordheim]

Ideally Chrome shouldn't have that big of a memory bleed issue (to my knowledge at least). We use it pretty heavily in a rather large organization. We did have some firewall issues on our end at Go-Live that had to be remedied, but other than that, we aren't running into any further issues. (I don't remember the details of the issues, but it was something along the lines of having to better allow 2-way traffic.)

Warning Logs would be under: System Logs -> System Log -> Warnings

Error Logs would be: System Logs -> System Log -> Warnings

Transaction Logs: System Logs -> Transactions

[Steve McCarty]

There should be a section in the navigator for System Logs if you are an admin in your instance.  There are a number of different logs there you can look through.  If you know a time when you had the problem you can filter the logs for around that time frame to try to help narrow it down.  If you can open ServiceNow in another browser when you are having the problem, you can look at the Active Transactions in the System Diagnostics section and see if there is something running on the server that is delaying the response.  You can also look at the slow transactions in the System Diagnostics section and see if there is anything related to your application that is taking a long time.  You can also just look at the business rules or UI scripts that are running on that application.  It may be that one of those is cycling through a large number of records and that will definitely slow down your system.

If you have a test instance where you can recreate the problem, you could try disabling some business rules or UI scripts and see if it still freezes up.  I wouldn't recommend doing that on your production instance.  

As far as archiving cases, I generally just change the default filters on the menu items to only show open cases.  Incidents have an "Active" flag you can use to filter the list.  Then you aren't trying to load a list of 29,000 cases every time you go back to the list.  You can still pull up old cases if you need them, it just doesn't load them every time.  Sometimes just lowering the number of items that you show in the list can help things load faster.  I set mine to only show 20 rows per page.

Like I said before, these problems can be hard to figure out.  You just have to keep poking around in the logs and see if you can find what is causing the issue.  We had performance problems at one time that turned out to be related to some software counters getting stuck in an endless loop because we had two departments that were listed as their own parent records.  So you never know.