Opening a sales order can be painful. My coworkers have mentioned that response times can get really lengthy. I’m a developer. So I wonder, “Is it one of my scripts that’s causing this?  How can I tell?” I’ve come up with a method that lets me put my finger on the culprit!

First, make sure you’ve installed the APM bundle. Disclaimer: According to NetSuite’s experts at SuiteWorld 2018, APM simply reads log files. It does not add additional overhead to your already slow transactions. And, since it simply reads log files, there is no risk to install it on a production system. I installed it during the day while I was out of the office at SuiteWorld.

Once you get APM installed, open the Page Time Summary page.

Customization >> Performance >> Page Time Summary

Select a transaction that is giving you problems and a timeframe representative of normal operations.

In the detail section of this screen, click the icon to download the raw data.

After I exported to Excel, I deleted the first 2 columns, date/time and email address. Those are unimportant. Next, I formatted my headings and froze the top row. Then I sorted the TOTAL column in descending order. This brought the poorest performing transactions to the top.

Here’s where the magic starts! Select all the cells in the range A2 through column E and the last row of your data.

Go to the Home tab in Excel and click on Conditional Formatting >> New Rule.

Create a rule that changes the background color of cells from light to dark based on the value in the cell. This makes it easy to see what is causing response times to elongate.

Once you apply this rule, here’s what you see.

As I review this dataset, I see that as response time decreases the column for “Server Time” also decreases. All other columns remain relatively neutral (unchanging/random).

Please note: This is not saying I couldn’t improve response times by streamlining client scripts or server-side SuiteScripts. Obviously, that is true. What it says is that when my coworkers are getting elongated response times, it is the actual server at NetSuite that is contributing the most to the lengthy response.

For me, it might be time to call NetSuite!