Anyone experience slow load times since the performance upgrade? Sometimes I’m even getting “504 Gateway Time-out”. Some components of my app wont even load like a table or graphs. Sometimes when I submit a form or complete inline editing, the wheel will just keep spinning, sometimes submitting the date but often just never loading. This is of concern for large forms where a page reload removes all the data. This is happening throughout my app regardless of the page and is even happening sometimes when I visit the Knack homepage. Support is giving me the standard “we cannot replicate the issue” response. Very troubling…
Hi Ryan, sorry to hear that you’re running into performance issues in the new environment - would you mind sharing the number of the ticket you’ve submitted to support so that we could take another look?
Hi Marek, my apologies, we did not submit a ticket but rather had some dialogue through the support chat with Henrry.
Yep, I’m seeing the same thing with our app. Definitely is slower. I also have to constantly refresh the page because it gets hung up on loading (i am using the embedded mode).
Yes, sometimes it takes a long time just to update a record (admittedly we do have a lot of rules) but it’s not consistent, and some pages do take a very long time to run. Many of our views have a lot going on, but it’s slow enough that my client is not thrilled…
Yep, we have had issues with our apps. We have had things work fine before upgrade and stopped working consistently the day after upgrade but support wants to tell me it’s not related
Yes I am having the same issues, it has gone backwards in performance. I had similar issues 5 years ago where I had to re-build views because they just won’t display and now it is happening again. This includes the builder where views are disappearing and reappearing if I log in and out, disheartening to see as my customers have had to put up with major outages for years now as knack works to mature its offering.
This is happening throughout most of our apps as well since the performance upgrade. We’ve been experiencing slow load times for live pages and constant connection timeout errors when using the builder. It’s extremely frustrating when trying to make builder updates as keep getting disconnected. We’re getting “504 Gateway Error Timeout" too which rarely happened previously. Sometimes when submitting forms in live pages or completing batch updates using the builder the wheel will just keeps spinning or doesn’t indicate any actions have occurred.
Unfortunately for some users, the performance ended up worsening after the move to the new environment; but even though these issues may all seem similar at a quick glance they may have different causes in the new environment.
This is also why we investigate those on a case-by-case basis so that we can figure out if there actually are any common causes. Performance is our top priority right now and is something that we’re working on, so if you are running into issues could you please submit a ticket to support@knack.com with the details so that we could take a closer look? Thanks!
We have a very large app also - we were one of the first to migrate due to the size of our app they wanted to move the larger ones ahead. We have been with knack for about 8 years and used to love it.
It has been agonizing, our app was virtually unusable for the 1st 2 weeks after migration. Support was unresponsive due to an internal email issue they were having but I think they were having a large volume of trouble tickets. We asked to be moved back to the original environment but no response.
Our page load times have doubled, form submit / refresh times have quadrupled, even a simple inline edit can take 10 to 30 seconds to update and refresh. Some days its better some days its really bad. Our apps structure has been effected also due to the changes in search functions.
The bottom line is that our labor costs for anyone working on our app are now double due to the slow down in performance. Our efficiency is gone. We keep hoping the performance will improve but it doesn’t seem likely, we are evaluating other platforms and considering a complete move away from Knack.
I really would love to see things improve - good luck to all.
I have faith that Knack will figure this out. Really love how simple it is to use. If you are experiencing the same issues, please try to take a screen video and submit a support ticket as this will increase the likelihood and speed at which the issues can be addressed by knack. Thanks for your responses Marek and the rest of the community for contributing!
Thanks for the vote of confidence here, Ryan - as mentioned this is the biggest priority of our engineering team currently, and the current issues are not something we’re content with either, and we’re currently working on.
Jim, we’d love to see you stay with Knack, and we understand that this is not quite what you were hoping for with the new environment. We’re aiming to improve the performance, but can’t precisely say just yet when would that happen.
As far as the actual support response times are concerned, we were actually dealing with a very high volume of support requests that the team was not able to deal with in due time. To address this we’ve already increased the size of our team and are also aggressively hiring so that we can reply in a more reasonable timeframe.
As I understand, you’ve already submitted tickets to us regarding the issues you’re mentioning (doubled load times, quadrupled submit times, etc) - have you received responses to those?
Sorry, posted with wrong account.
Will redo with Cortex R&D now.
Hi Ryan,
Yes, I’ve experienced the same problem on two different Knack accounts, and both have gotten a lot worse lately. I get complaint emails every week about minute-long spinners, missed Submits and white screens. In the console logs, I see errors 502, 503 and 504 all day long.
I sure hope they find a solution because I’ve based my new career 100% on Knack for the last 3.5 years, and was about to kick into high gear in 2023 with new industrial contracts. But I’m hesitating now, and waiting a bit more to see what happens.
All this to say that I may have something to help you out. See this piece of code I wrote to address this and several other shortcomings in Knack, along with a bunch of cool other features I use every day in all projects.
It’s called the “Knack Toolkit Library”, aka KTL. You can find it here on my Github: GitHub - cortexrd/Knack-Toolkit-Library: Knack Toolkit Library
In this page, go in the ZeroConfig folder and you’ll see a file named “KTL_ZeroConfig_ACB.js”. Copy it content using the “Copy raw content” icon on top right of text pane (left of the trash can). Then paste it in the Javascript pane in the Builder.
Go back to the main page and do the same with the “ktl.css” file but, as you guessed it, paste it in the CSS pane of the Builder this time.
If you have custom Javascript and CSS already, they will not conflict.
Just cut/paste your existing Javascript code between those lines:
//My App code - BEGIN
//…
//My App code - END
For the CSS, just insert mine before of after yours, it doesn’t matter.
Refresh your page and you’ll have a new feature called “form data persistence”, ready to be used. This means that all text, single selection dropdown, checkbox and a few more type of data will be saved locally on your machine. Some field types are not supported yet, but will soon be. The data remains stored until successfully Submitted, or when you navigate away from that page. So, if ever the process aborts, times-out or your machine shuts down for any reason, when you reach that page, it will reload the data.
Also, if the spinner goes on for 60 seconds, the page is reloaded automatically (timer is configurable).
There are tons of other cool features:
- User Filters. When you apply a filter, you can now save them, to a named button for instant retrieval. Also saves the current sort column and order, and Search value.
- Numeric pre-validation: if a field is numeric and you type in non-numeric values, it will turn pink and Submit disabled.
- Full-screen Kiosk mode
- Barcode reader and decoding
- Auto-focus
- Inactivity timeout
- Fix for the buggy dropdown
- Bulk Edit and Delete
- Extensive logging of logins, navigation and activity
- Heartbeat monitoring
and much more…
See the documentation in main page to get an overview. BTW, it is due for a good update, I am working on this.
Let me know if you find this useful, and if you have questions.
Normand D.
Cortex R&D Inc.
Thanks Normand! Performance issues are no longer issues in my application, back to normal!
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Batch updates, imports and deleting files sometimes take more than 20 minutes to initiate and sometimes don’t start at all.
Hi Steve,
We’re sorry to hear that this is the experience you’ve had. If this happens again for you, please don’t hesitate to share the details of what occurred while attempting to perform these tasks with our support team. Without reports from our customers, we’re not able to investigate the causes of these experiences to improve our systems.
We appreciate your contribution here in the forum, and we look forward to helping you succeed with Knack however we can!
Have a great week! 