What's the best way to investigate list view performance issues?

[zheil]

I was just wondering if those who have experience with investigating list view performance issues could share their best practice guidelines.

[tltoulson · Accepted solution]

Hi Zalan,

List view performance issues can generally be isolated to a few specific areas:

1.   Display Business Rules / Calculated Fields - These are performed on every record displayed and can be time consuming. Try enabling Debug Business Rules to trace any of these types of problems.

2.   Number of fields being displayed - Default is 20 but you can display up to 100.   This pagination basically tells the query "return results after you have found x number of records".   The higher the number selected, the longer the query will run.   Try displaying fewer records.

3.   The nature of the query itself - Try turning on Debug SQL to see performance impact of the queries or use the Slow Query Logs - ServiceNow Wiki

        - Contains/Starts with/Ends With:   These string matching queries can take a long time compared to exact match

        - Query on non-indexed fields:   It appears as though fields such as Reference and Choice List, and True/False are indexed by default.   Querying these fields will be faster than non-indexed fields. Tables and Columns Module - ServiceNow Wiki

[Slava Savitsky]

I think Travis mentioned almost everything. One other thing that comes to my mind is sorting. Sorting by "Created by" or "Update by" works really fast; sorting by Number can be much slower; sorting by a non-indexed field can take ages. If a specific user is complaining about a specific list loading very slowly, check their "table_name.db.order" user preference.

[zheil]

Thanks for your comments Travis Toulson and Slava !