LemonadeLXP's infrastructure is powered by two of the biggest names in the industry: Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Cloudflare.
Static assets are served by AWS Cloudfront, which is Amazon's Low Latency content delivery service. It is currently the fastest CDN available worldwide (in fact, it's a Multi-CDN system). Cloudfront has over 310 globally dispersed points of presence with automated network mapping - it ensures that you always pull content from the node nearest to you.
Dynamic assets are served directly from our C5N instance fleet on their 100 Gbps network in North Virginia. Some dynamic assets are cached by Cloudflare, for an extra performance boost.
Cloudflare in turn applies a number of connection-level optimizations to make things as fast as possible, including:
HTTP/2
HTTP/2 to Origin, with Enhanced Prioritization
HTTP/3 with QUIC
0-RTT Connection Resumption
Brotli Compression
File Size Optimization (with Lossless WebP image codecs), auto-minification and more.
Cloudflare's TCP Turbo technology
After pushing through security appliances, our round-trip average response time consistently sits between 279 and 496ms, measured by a third-party monitoring system, Pingdom. That's really fast.
Why Are Things Slow For Me?
If you're here because you're experiencing slowdowns, we've got some ideas that can help. Despite having one of the fastest possible SaaS architecture configurations today - slowdowns and bottlenecks can still occur in many places.
Are you working through a VPN? VPNs are one of the most common bottlenecks. They are bound to physical connections and quite often cannot scale horizontally. Network admins try to right-size the appliances based on demand, but peak load may tell a different story. If you are working through a VPN, know that it is not required for LemonadeLXP (which is on the public Internet). As a test, try disconnecting from the VPN to access LemonadeLXP to see if the speed improves. If your SSO requires VPN, you can VPN to log in and then disconnect (your session within LemonadeLXP will persist).
Are you on a corporate network with a security appliance? The bottleneck often lies in the speed with which your network appliance can scan content before it is served to you. This is one of the reasons why in our "Working with Firewalls" guide, we recommend that LemonadeLXP's resources bypass any network-level proxies: http://academy.launchfire.com/en/articles/3348351-working-behind-firewalls. You'll need to work with your Network/IT teams if you suspect this might be at play.
Plain old congestion can be an issue as well. It's an age-old problem; too many staff/stations on the same Internet connection (WAN) create conditions where you are competing for bandwidth. You can test available connection speeds by using a tool like https://www.speedtest.net. As a guide, consider that if your connection speed is ~1 megabit per second, a 1MB file will take 8 seconds to download. As a different yardstick, Netflix recommends having at least 3 Mbps available to watch a movie in low quality. What connection speeds are you getting?
Are working on a WiFi network whose router is at capacity? Can you try a wired connection? If you're stuck on WiFi, is it an older router that can be upgraded to support more recent WiFi technologies?
If on WiFi, bottlenecks can also be caused by channel congestion. Multiple WiFi networks on the same channel can lead to a significant drop in connection quality (more common in residential settings, where routers sometimes ship with default channel settings). Channels might not be what you think (we're not talking 2.4GHz or 5GHz here); routers operate on "channels" that are small bands within the larger frequency band, like radio channels, that determine the wave frequency range that your router uses to transmit a wireless signal. Your router's admin panel usually has a dropdown that lets you select which channel it'll use.
If you've checked all of the above, e.g., you have substantial bandwidth, no security appliance (or a fast one, or at least one with the proper bypass rules installed), and you are not connected through a VPN - it's time to examine your workstation.
Where you'll want to turn to your IT staff for help at the workstation level, here are some guiding questions that might help:
Do you have a local virus scanner that could be chewing up your CPU? Do things improve if you pause it for a second?
Are you out of hard drive space? This is a common gremlin that can really wreak havoc on any OS.
Are you on a workstation that is just "generally slow"? Tuning a workstation involves looking at a lot of different factors. How much RAM do you have? What CPU? How fast is your drive? Are other processes locking up your drive or RAM? Your IT representatives should be able to help you with this if you suspect your machine's specs might be a part of the problem.
Do you have a multitude of applications open that are consuming your memory? If your browser is competing for resources, it will make things feel sluggish for sure.
Do you have many tabs open in your browser that could be causing your browser to consume a lot of resources? Do things improve if you quit your browser, open it up "fresh," and access only LemonadeLXP (e.g., just one tab open)?
Are you using an older, outdated, or unsupported browser?
Can you try from a different device on the same network? If it works on another device, it might be "computer issues," - which would encourage researching in the third bullet of this list (above).
Concluding
We hope this gives you a bit of ammunition with which to hunt down any performance-related gremlins! Since LemonadeLXP is an in-browser application, browser and network health are vital to a fast LemonadeLXP experience.