Two minutes off the slowest workflow
Finding out why an analytics platform’s slowest workflows were slow, and taking up to two minutes off them.
- React
- TypeScript
Outcome
- Up to two minutes removed from the slowest workflows
- People no longer wait for work they didn’t ask for
The problem
Several workflows on the platform were slow enough that people started them and went to do something else. Nobody reported it any more, because it had always been that way.
Finding the cause needed no special tooling. The browser’s own developer tools pointed straight at it. The useful question was why it was doing so much work.
What I did
Most of that work was for something few people ever needed. I moved it to the moment someone actually asks for it, so everyone else stopped waiting for it.
What I would do differently
I accepted that part of the system as it was for too long. It had been slow since before I joined, everyone had stopped mentioning it, and I treated that as a fact about the system instead of something I could question. Once I looked at what it was doing, the fix was small.