Reviewing response time on forms

  • Release version: Zurich
  • Updated July 31, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Reviewing response time on forms

    ServiceNow provides a response time indicator on many forms and lists to help administrators and users monitor the processing time of completed transactions. This feature breaks down the total response time into key components, such as network transfer, server processing, and browser rendering, enabling detailed analysis of form performance.

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    Key Features

    • Response Time Indicator: A clock icon appears at the end of forms and lists showing total transaction time. Users can click the icon to toggle detailed timing information or hover to see a tooltip summary.
    • Timing Breakdown: Displays total time, network transfer time, server processing time (calculated as client response time minus browser and network times), and browser rendering time.
    • Exclusions: The indicator does not appear for simple operations (e.g., paging, sorting) or for the first transaction in a session.
    • Configurable: Administrators can disable the response time indicator by setting the glide.ui.responsetime property to false in the System Properties table.
    • System Logs Integration: Response times for various transactions can be reviewed in system logs to identify periods of unusually long processing or transactions that consistently take longer than expected.
    • Client Transaction Timings Plugin: Provides enhanced detail on timing spent on client and server sides, including browser and network delays, to pinpoint performance bottlenecks.

    Practical Use for ServiceNow Customers

    This response time monitoring enables ServiceNow customers to:

    • Quickly identify and troubleshoot slow form and list transactions by understanding where delays occur (network, server, or browser).
    • Analyze historical transaction performance via system logs to detect unusual load patterns or inefficient queries affecting performance.
    • Optimize system performance by pinpointing specific long-running transactions or periods of high load, leading to more informed tuning or architectural decisions.
    • Control visibility of response time data based on organizational preferences by enabling or disabling the indicator.

    Overall, this feature supports proactive performance management and improved user experience on forms and lists within ServiceNow.

    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.

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

    Figure 2. Response time details
    Response statistics

    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.
    1. 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.
    2. 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.