Widget - Performance question

[Victor Monteale]

Hi everyone, I have a question about widgets in Employee Center. We are building a new widget to submit data to a custom table. One of the functionalities is to automatically save the form data at short intervals. The widget is intended to be used by around 500–600 users (not necessarily at the same time). Could this cause any performance issues for the ServiceNow platform if the widget autosaves frequently, or is this something ServiceNow can handle? and in case you know, how we can test performance for this scenario?

[Tanushree Maiti · Accepted solution]

Hi @Victor Monteale 

A widget that autosaves frequently for 500–600 users is very likely to create substantial performance issues. Every autosave initiates database transactions and can trigger business logic, policy checks, and audit processes.

When many users are saving at short intervals, the cumulative load can lead to high CPU utilization, semaphore contention, and noticeable degradation in overall instance performance.

• If 500 users trigger a save every few seconds, the sheer volume of simultaneous API calls will lock records and exhaust available system semaphores

if instead of "not necessarily at the same time"  - you would have mentioned  " not at same time" - In that case I dont see any risk.

[Victor Monteale]

Hi @Tanushree Maiti, thank you so much for your quick response. Yes, definitely the issue is that they can use it at the same time.