Tips & Tricks for Best Performance when using Rally

Products

CA Agile Central On Premise (Rally) CA Agile Central SaaS (Rally)

Issue/Introduction

Here's how to make Rally Software more performant -- speed up the load of pages and work items by using the latest and greatest, and some best practices.

Environment

Release:
Component: ACPREM, ACSAAS

Resolution

Here are some best practices/suggestions to make your subscription more performant:

General Performance information:
- If you are viewing a long list of work items, remove any columns that have to load a lot of data or information
- Keep your column list to a minimum. You can filter your data after the information is pulled. It is not necessary to display a column to filter on it.
- Tags, milestones, and anything with multiple values in a field can really slow things down, even custom fields
- Filtering on a field, such as Tags, is fine, but showing them in a column will slow things down
- Use a small page size (ex: 25 instead of 200). This can be changed in the bottom left corner of a page. Customize the Number of Work Items Displayed
- Large amounts of data returned can slow down an application.
- Using a lot of filters, queries or "group by" within apps can cause performance issues.
- Some apps will allow queries in the settings of the application. If the queries being used are inefficient, they can slow down the app.
- Spanning a large hierarchy in project scoping when it is not needed.
Custom Pages and Dashboards
- Dashboards and Custom Pages are immensely useful in Rally. By adding apps to custom pages, the user is able to see exactly the data they want to see, how they want to see it. Similar to other pages, the more data loaded the longer it will take for the page to load.
- Recommendations:
  - Have 5 or fewer applications (Apps) on any custom page or your dashboard. If you need more than 5, we recommend creating them on separate custom pages.
  - There may be one application slowing down the whole page. Move this to another page if possible.
  - Apps load from the top down on custom pages/the dashboard.
  - "Visually exciting" items can slow loading down - graphs, charts, progress bars, tags, etc; showing multiples of these apps on one page will most likely impact a page’s performance
  - Older apps such as Subscription or Community apps may be slower than Rally core applications. If your Subscription or Community Apps are slow please work with the developer of these apps for assistance.
- Relevant Help Articles:
Rally Core Pages
- Many pages in Agile Central are meant to display work items to the end user in a number of highly-customizable ways. Some pages are more data-intensive than others, which may load more slowly than others that load less data. If a user would like to see more data on a page such as Portfolio Items, it should be noted that there is a large amount of data to be retrieved that may be associated with a portfolio item. On the other hand, a page such as Work Views which is designed to show less data in a more controlled manner will load more quickly.
- Recommendations:
  - Use Anchored View when viewing details of a work item and even allows for copy & paste of images in the Description field!
  - Use Full View - when viewing details of a work item
  - Use the Work Views page instead of older pages or more data-intensive pages like Portfolio Items, when you want to view/manage your work items.
Project Picker Hierarchy
- While displaying the roll-up (or down) of data across projects in a hierarchy can be helpful, there is also an impact on page load time that should be considered. If a user is looking to load all data across the hierarchy at once, it should be noted that the page will load more slowly. Scoping down to a specific project while show less data, but the page will load more quickly.
- Recommendations:
  - Projects should be created based on teams.
  - Scope directly to the project in question by unchecking Show Items from Child/Parent Projects in your Project Picker. If you are scoped all the way up the hierarchy, at the highest Parent level, you will likely encounter performance issues because the application loads all the data from all projects in the workspace.
  - If you ‘Expand All’ on older pages, such as User Stories, it has to pull all scoped fields from other projects and this will increase the time it takes the page to load.
  - Use the Work Views page should solve this issue. Users can see what they want to see without having to traverse through the whole project hierarchy on page loads.
- Relevant Help Articles:

Additional Information

agile central; rally; slow; performance;