Reviewing response time on forms

Release version: Australia

Updated March 12, 2026

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Summary of Reviewing Response Time on Forms

The response time indicator is a feature that appears at the end of forms and lists, showing the processing time for transactions. This includes total time taken and a breakdown of time spent on data transfer, server processing, and browser rendering. Users can view or hide these details by selecting the icon next to the response time indicator.

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Key Features

Response Time Indicator: Displays processing times for transactions, offering insights into performance.
Detailed Breakdown: Hovering over the icon reveals tooltip details, while selecting it shows a full breakdown of processing times.
Customization: Administrators can disable the response time feature through the glide.ui.responsetime property in the System Properties table.
System Logs: Users can review transaction response times through system logs, identifying unusual delays or specific transactions causing performance issues.
Client Transaction Timings Plugin: Provides additional insights into time spent on client and server sides, helping to diagnose performance bottlenecks.

Key Outcomes

By utilizing the response time indicator and system logs, ServiceNow customers can effectively monitor and improve form response times. This enables proactive identification of performance issues, enhancing user experience and system efficiency. Additionally, the Client Transaction Timings plugin offers deeper analysis, aiding in pinpointing the source of delays and optimizing overall performance.

A response time indicator (clock) appears at the end of many forms and lists.

This indicator provides the processing time for a completed transaction, including the total time and the time for each step. Select the icon to show and hide the response time details. Hover over the icon to see a tooltip with the details. The following example shows the response time for retrieving a filtered list in a demo instance.

Response time (ms): 3326, network: 75, server: 1963, browser: 1288 — Figure 1. Response time

In this example, the transaction took the following amount of processing time:

3326 milliseconds total time
75 milliseconds moving data across the network
1963 milliseconds on the server
Note:
Server time is calculated using the following formula:
```
server time = (client response time - browser time - client network time)
```
1288 milliseconds in the browser, rendering the HTML and parsing and executing JavaScript

A response time indicator doesn’t appear for simple operations, such as paging or changing a list sort order. The response time indicator also doesn't appear for the first transaction in a session.

To view a detailed breakdown of the processing time on forms, select the response time indicator icon.

Response statistics — Figure 2. Response time details

Administrators can disable the response time by setting the glide.ui.response_time property to false in the System Properties [sys_properties] table. In the navigation filter, enter sys_properties.list and search for glide.ui.response_time.

Reviewing response times from system logs

You can use the system logs to review a list of response times for different transactions. To view the log, navigating to All > System Logs and select the relevant log type. When you review response times, look for the following issues.

A period where all transactions took an unusually long time. For example, transactions that normally took 1 second took 15 seconds between 11:00 AM and 11:20 AM. This issue can indicate that an unusual load, such as a large report, ran on that app server during that time.
A specific transaction which repeatedly took an unusually long time. For example, the list of closed incidents sorted by short description took 30 seconds each time it was displayed. This issue can indicate that a particular transaction put an unusual database load on the system, such as sorting 500,000 records on an unindexed field.

If you notice issues with form response times, see Improving response times on forms.

Client transaction timings

The Client Transaction Timings plugin provides extra information about the time spent on both the client and server sides, by the browser and the network. This feature not only helps find long-running processes, but also provides information about where in the process the performance issue is caused.

For more information, see Client transaction timings.