Why does Webmail interface take FOREVER to load in browser?

Question asked by mark finguerra - 8/21/2017 at 8:45 AM

Answered

I upgraded recently from 15x to 16x. Now, webmail interface takes literally forever to load in browser. This is not a browser specific issue btw, I'm seeing this on all popular clients, eg firefox chrome ie. This is intolerable for a product touted as 'cutting edge'.

Also, anyone know when global search is being reinstated. 16x destroyed that very useful feature.

I'm having 16x buyer remorse :-/ How hard is it to downgrade?

35 Replies

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Dave Hunter Replied

8/21/2017 at 9:14 AM

So you have the latest release of Version 16.2.6439 (Aug 18, 2017) and still find it slow?

I've been watching v16 for months and will not be upgrading until everyone agrees that 16 is faster or equal to 15. So far I've followed improvements but still see complaints about the interface loading slowly.

Derek Curtis Replied

8/21/2017 at 9:35 AM

Employee Post Marked As Answer

Mark,

Try upgrading to Friday's release. (16.2.6439) It has some more efficiency improvements that will speed up the initial load times across browsers. It also includes Advanced Search.

Derek Curtis COO SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com

mark finguerra Replied

8/21/2017 at 4:21 PM

Thank you. I shall report back here.

Webio Replied

8/22/2017 at 4:29 AM

Yes. The same on my end. I just can't perform upgrade to v16 to check how it works. I know I can test it on test environment but this is almost always different than production environment.

mark finguerra Replied

8/24/2017 at 4:39 PM

loaded current 16.2.6442. global search is back whoo hoo, but load times still suck. firefox 20 seconds and chrome 12 seconds [timex improve once page is cached]. this is just intolerable, you can go play a round of golf while waiting for the darn web interface to load. no bueno

Dave Hunter Replied

9/6/2017 at 8:04 AM

Make SmarterMail Great Again.

Pleaaaaase, this should be a priority as it likely affects every single user who uses the web interface. I literally check the forum and patch notes every day praying to see posts about speed finally being as fast v15.

Thanks and God bless <3

Robert G. Replied

9/21/2017 at 10:41 AM

On Version 16.3.6467

This is still an issue for us. It happens to customers with large amounts of email. We have a few users with 200GB+ worth of emails and when clicking on older emails we get a spinning circle and it takes about 10 to 20 seconds to load. Smartermail 15 handled these users without issues.

Here is a video https://youtu.be/-IYN0K_2qhc

Sometimes it loads quick other times it doesn't.

GearHost.com

mark finguerra Replied

9/21/2017 at 4:41 PM

I upgraded to latest 16.3.6467. Still snail-like loading in firefox and not much better in chrome. Very disappointing. All of our employees are complaining. Please make this a priority.

best,

Alain Néris Replied

9/22/2017 at 5:41 AM

I upgraded from SM15 to SM16 in july and downgraded from SM16 to SM15 very quickly, a few days later, for the same reasons. I always use SM support ticket for major upgrades and I do not regret at all the support ticket cost. The people SM staff did the upgrade and downgrade jobs, as soon as I asked them to do it. My users and me recovered the good, clever and fast SM 15, until these community threads will reflect that SM 16 is as reliable in a production environment as SM 15.

echoDreamz Replied

9/22/2017 at 7:54 AM

Ditto here as well - Though ST's tests attributed this to disk performance issues, even though Microsoft, the RAID manufacturer all stated the disks are not overloaded. All these other SM customers reporting and showing the exact issues I am seeing here, who were not previously complaining, just like us. So I decided to setup a free SM 16 test server here locally in our office, zipped up and copied over my user folder, ~2GB of mail. Tested on a loan server, not running anything, on SSD RAID 0 for max performance and still saw the spinning blue ring of death lasting up to 8 seconds in some cases. I pulled a previous backup I had of our corporate domain which was done before we upgraded to SM16 (still SM15). Installed the latest free copy of SM15 on the same server, put my data on it, loaded it up and.... Instant. All requests to load my folders, view individual mails were instant, so quick in fact there is no way I could really time it myself.

So this to me signals some issue within SmarterMail. We have humored ST though and purchased an LSI CacheCade key for SSD caching, I am not opposed to anything that will help increase performance, I just dont think this comes down to our drives, especially with so many people complaining of the same issue.

Robert G. Replied

9/25/2017 at 3:02 PM

Still an issue on the latest version 16.3.6474. Anyone else?

GearHost.com

mark finguerra Replied

9/25/2017 at 5:41 PM

im on the release before you. it seems as though our pleads are falling on deaf ears over at smartertools. ive spent so much $ with these guys, it's unnerving that they are so inattentive to customer's needs. prob time to find a new email platform. the future wil only be worse with these guys '[in my opinion].

dont hold your breath waiting on a fix. prob wont see it till v17, when they gouge us all again for $.

Paul Blank Replied

9/30/2017 at 5:48 AM

I doubt that ST is holding off on fixing v16 speed issues until the release of v17. I suggest sticking with v15 for the time being, as do many others here.

Paul Blank Replied

9/30/2017 at 5:50 AM

These are NOT disk or hardware-related issues.

Nathan Replied

9/30/2017 at 6:19 AM

Received notification the other day that 1st October they are increasing licensing costs! Seems poor timing given the ***** v16 release.

Paul Blank Replied

9/30/2017 at 6:53 AM

Somehow I don't think "*****" means that v16 gets 5 stars from Nathan.

mark finguerra Replied

9/30/2017 at 9:33 AM

is there an official downgrade procedure for 16x-->15x ? im seriously thinking of doing it but i'm afraid of problems

Nathan Replied

9/30/2017 at 9:46 AM

:-)

Every major release always brings issues, having been a user for some years I know never to touch the 'RTM' release and probably wait for at least a couple of releases before touching it.

v16 looked promising, particularly the video conferencing but that turned out to be a third party service rather than baked into the product. Considering the sales pitch is an Exchange replacement I am not sure which version it is being compared to but I thinking something pre 5.5 but then again even that worked.

When paying good money for a 'product' I expect it to work and even more so when I am paying a premium for things like ActiveSync licensing. Given we are all up against O365 and the relatively low pricing we need SmarterMail to be robust, do what it says on the tin and do it well.

The past few major releases seem to have been tinkering around the edges rather than fixing the things that matter. Other than making things like ActiveSync and EWS work well perhaps features that would allow for scalability and availability. Let's have the capability to separate IMAP/POP/SMTP and Webmail into separate servers and multiple of each.

The main reason we persist with Smartermail is because of the relative eye candy, certainly compared to open source alternatives. However, I would swap Smartermail for Dovecot / Exim and the flexibility it brings in a moment but RoundCube whilst functional is not pretty.

Paul Blank Replied

9/30/2017 at 9:47 AM

From other comments, it appears that ST will help with this; it might consume one support incident, if you have those. Maybe ask them.

Paul Blank Replied

10/1/2017 at 7:56 AM

Nathan Y said: "The past few major releases seem to have been tinkering around the edges rather than fixing the things that matter. Other than making things like ActiveSync and EWS work well perhaps features that would allow for scalability and availability. Let's have the capability to separate IMAP/POP/SMTP and Webmail into separate servers and multiple of each."

Add Calendars to this "scheme" and I'm in full agreement. Indeed, perhaps all ancillary features should be separate services that can be added as needed.

But ST has doubled-down on pushing v16, while many suffering email admins continue to scratch their heads, and users continue to howl.

Alain Néris Replied

10/1/2017 at 12:13 PM

According to my experience, the support ticket worths it... May be this ticket could be used too for a future upgrade ?... It shoud be, I think... During the downgrade, the support agent encountered a problem of credentials to finish it. He gave me the exact procedure to finish it with my credentials. I suppose, it was not a common issue, since it was due to my network configuration. But I do not regret the support ticket for MAJOR upgrades (and downgrades).

mark finguerra Replied

10/1/2017 at 7:06 PM

They should publish it given how buggy 16x is

Gary Tan Replied

10/2/2017 at 12:17 AM

Hi Guys,

Same problem here, but I do change the "login background" to improve login to solid color instead of default image, this could gave faster login screen

Hope could help.

Cheers

echoDreamz Replied

10/2/2017 at 8:02 PM

If I make a time machine, the first thing I am doing, I am going back to the day we upgraded to SM16, and I am going to kill myself for approving it. That way, the upgrade possibly gets delayed...

Paul Blank Replied

10/2/2017 at 8:28 PM

Christopher, LOL (I NEVER use LOL) here, even though I know how serious your situation must be.

Matthew Leyda Replied

10/2/2017 at 8:49 PM

My paranoid policy of waiting 3 months before upgrading sure paid off this time. I hope SM supports V15 for a while.

Kendra Support http://www.kendra.com support@kendra.com 425-397-7911 Junk Email filtered ISP

echoDreamz Replied

10/2/2017 at 8:55 PM

My time machine building skills are going up 10x today :)

Matthew Leyda Replied

10/2/2017 at 9:08 PM

When you get it up and running can you let us know if V17 is OK or should we wait for V18 :)

Kendra Support http://www.kendra.com support@kendra.com 425-397-7911 Junk Email filtered ISP

Matthew Leyda Replied

10/2/2017 at 9:10 PM

Remember when there was Windows Me ....

Kendra Support http://www.kendra.com support@kendra.com 425-397-7911 Junk Email filtered ISP

Paul Blank Replied

10/2/2017 at 9:42 PM

Heck, I remember Bob...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob

But I (seriously!) digress. Maybe we are more-or-less in Vista-land.

Matthew Leyda Replied

10/2/2017 at 11:16 PM

Paul, You are a little kinder than I am :)

Kendra Support http://www.kendra.com support@kendra.com 425-397-7911 Junk Email filtered ISP

Paul Blank Replied

10/3/2017 at 4:18 AM

Just hoping that some folk will finally emerge (escape?) from their bubble.

echoDreamz Replied

10/3/2017 at 7:46 AM

ST has been working hard though on all the bug fixes etc. Everything we've submitted has been taken care of quickly and swiftly, even a lot of our feedback. Though a lot of it has been set forward for SM17, which is a ways off :).

Robert G. Replied

10/5/2017 at 7:29 AM

"Help", more like point fingers at our hardware.

GearHost.com

Paul Blank Replied

10/5/2017 at 12:38 PM

If you have had that experience, it would be good of you to share details here. Somehow I doubt that hardware is at the root of most of the reported issues.

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