Rally - Performance: Tips & Tricks for Best Performance

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

Recommendations

Dashboards/Custom Pages

Project Picker Hierarchy

Loading Work Items

  

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

 

Dashboards/Custom Pages

Dashboards and Custom Pages are immensely useful in Agile Central. 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 is being loaded at once, 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 then 5, we recommend creating them on separate custom pages.
• "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

 

Relevant Help Articles:

• Create Custom Pages
• Customize Your Dashboard
• Using Rally Apps

 

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:

• Work Views
• Set Up Your Projects (Teams)
• Change Project Scoping

 

Loading Work Items

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 to 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.
• If you are viewing a long list of work items, remove any columns that have to load a lot of data or information
• 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

 

 

Additional Information

agile central; rally; slow; performance;