MSP Integration performance best practices

Products

• Clarity PPM On Premise
• Clarity PPM SaaS

Issue/Introduction

This articles covers Best Practices to prevent Performance Issues when integrating with the Clarity Microsoft Project (MSP) Interface Add-in.

If you are seeing slow performance (long load times) when opening projects from MS Project, this article provides best practices to avoid performance issues. If projects are stuck hanging, see the additional information section for some steps to assist with some known issues. 

Environment

Release: All Supported
Component: Clarity Microsoft Project Integration

Resolution

Table of Contents

• Both New Driver and Legacy Driver
  • Number of Tasks versus Task Durations
  • Assignments
  • Baselines
  • Master Projects/Programs 
  • Organizer
• Java Memory Limit
• New Driver Specific
• Legacy Driver Specific
• Known Issues
• Troubleshooting

Below are tips on preventing performance issues with Microsoft Project:

Both New Driver and Legacy Driver

Number of Tasks versus Task Durations

• You can have a deep project (with many tasks), or you can have a wide project (tasks with a longer duration), but it's recommended to stay away from a deep and wide project as this increases the size of the project which causes performance issues. 

• The longer the task duration, the longer it will take to export the project. Keep these types of tasks at a minimum. Bring in any tasks that are not needed to be far out in the future.
• For more details on MSP and task performance, see: MSP Integration and the Number of Tasks

Assignments

• The number of assignments can impact performance, so delete any unnecessary assignments.

Baselines

• Each additional project baseline can take the project longer to open, depending on the size of the project, as the baseline is a snapshot of the project plan, so the more baselines there are, the longer it takes to open/save the project.
• It's recommended to only export the current baseline to MSP.
  • The change to only export the current baseline is made in Clarity under Administration->Project Management->Settings.
  • IMPORTANT: Make sure no projects are currently checked out with baselines when this change is made or you will lose baseline data.

Master Projects/Programs 

• MSP will only allow 49 subprojects (though Clarity has no limit). Even if you are using less then 50 sub projects, if the subprojects have a lot of data, break out the program/project into multiple master projects with smaller amounts of subprojects. 

Organizer

• Deleting unused or custom items out of the organizer such as filters, etc which can help with performance

Java Memory Limit

• Set the maximum java memory usage for the MSP Interface - Increasing the java memory limit can be helpful with Microsoft Project (MSP) Performance issues when opening projects from Clarity or saving larger projects back to MSP. This KB provides the steps on how to do this.

New Driver Specific

• The XML driver is generally faster than the legacy driver, but there was a performance defect by Microsoft that still caused some slowness in some projects. There is a fix for this that is only supported as of Clarity 14.4 and higher. For Clarity 14.4 and higher, install the latest supported Microsoft Project update.

Legacy Driver Specific

• Use Uniform Loading Pattern is the best for optimized performance.
• The New Driver is overall faster than the Legacy driver, (see New Driver section for more details)

Known Issues

• See also MSP interface performance slowness with Clarity regarding environmental issues that can impact performance
• MSP Project crashing/performance issues on one project due to tasks with start/finish dates far out in past or future
• For problems opening projects including projects hanging when attempting to load, see: MSP opening projects issues - master KB

Troubleshooting

• If you need Broadcom Support's assistance with troubleshooting a performance issue, please provide the following information when opening a case to speed resolution:
  • Copy of the xml and mpp for the project found in your default MSP Save location on the workstation (Typically '\Documents'). To enable xml see: XML, MPP and MSP Logs for Troubleshooting MSP Issues
  • Copy of the mspxml_timing.log found in the \Documents\logs folder on the workstation

Additional Information

Generally, using one browser versus another (IE Chrome versus Internet Explorer) won't help with performance issues)

• For more information on MSP New Driver logs see XML, MPP and MSP Logs for Troubleshooting MSP Issues
• For problems opening projects including projects hanging when attempting to load, see: MSP opening projects - known issues with Clarity

Additional MSP Reference

• MSP Integration Known Issues - Master KB