Latency: a real morale killer
Posted in Prototyping | Jan 7, 01:38 pm
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Over the past year, I have experienced some difficulty using Shared Projects. The server provided to me by my former company had a severe latency issue. Each connection (for instance a simple repo-browser) in TortoiseSVN would take up to 2-4 seconds to perform.
Although a wait of around 2 seconds may not seem so bad, because Axure breaks up its files into many small components (anyone who has looked at a Shared Project directory will know what I mean), checking in – or out – a simple wireframe could end up having many files to transfer – with each one taking around 2-4 seconds to connect to the server, let alone any transfer time. (Which was somewhat slow anyway, considering we were using a shared 3G broadband connection.)
Some actions would take around 10-20 minutes to perform, after which the check-in might fail and have to be tried again. Considering the check-in dialogue does not have a ‘cancel’ button, or even any sense of how much longer one has to wait, you can imagine the project frustration within the team trying to deal with this. Much which would be (unfairly) directed at Axure itself.
In my new role, and new project, we also want to use the collaborative benefits of the Shared Projects feature. So we have set up an SVN repository to use on Beanstalk . This took a few minutes to set up, worked first time and is completely free for a three user account.
Now when I check in or out my pages, they take around 10 seconds rather than 10 minutes…
You can imagine I’m overjoyed.
By Luke Perman
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