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Comment by spollo | Hacker News Reader

I can't believe they are patting themselves on the back for performance. I'm running a brand new macbook pro, latest chrome, fiber internet AND asana fully cached. It still is a 6 second initial page load and then every single UI interaction is slow, slow, slow. My entire companies biggest pain point with asana is how insanely slow it is for a simple product.

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This was my largest gripe with Asana and why I was so happy when we moved away from it.

The simplicity of Asana is nice BUT the web app is terrible in how bloated it feels.

I hated clicking Asana links to a task because it would have to load the entire app and wasted what felt like so much time.

I appreciate that you're not trying to advertise for their competitor, so I'll be that guy... What did you switch to?

No affiliation, but even jira is snappier than asana for me.

Burn!

I'm not the GP, but we went through a similar journey here, and after ditching Asana, we went to Todoist, which is nice in its simplicity (and fast). Sooner or later, the simplicity became too simple, so we switched to Clubhouse, where we are now. It is serving us well.

Presumably, one day, we will outgrow that, and need to go to JIRA (with all of its power and complexity), but it would be nice to delay that inevitable as long as possible.

We never used Asana, but moved from Trello to Clubhouse as well after we outgrew Trello's simplicity. Clubhouse has been awesome so far, and generally loads quickly

Clubhouse is pretty sweet, I feel like it's basically Pivotal Tracker done right. Fast enough to not get in the way but flexible enough for most workflows. We're a pretty small company though, I don't know if something like JIRA becomes more necessary as the company scales.

I keep going back to Trello for my todo/issue needs. With stuff like Zapier it goes from being simple yet powerful to goddamn nuclear. But I have to be honest here and say that I've never experienced Asana as slow (it's underlying model just doesn't work for me).

Curious what you do with Trello and Zapier that is so compelling?

For example, create cards based on email sent to gmail or order cards sent to woo commerce. I have barely scratched the surface of what Trello+Zapier can do but I'm pleasantly surprised that there are tons of ready made 'zaps' for all kinds of app combos.

FWIW, we switched from Trello to Restyaboard and very happy with its features and speed.

Disclosure: I have suggested few features for Restyaboard and its developers implemented them.

Also not OP, but we've been using dapulse. Terrible name, but it's been working great. It has similar concepts to asana and trello. It loads fast and easy to use.

We moved to JIRA. Lost the simplicity but its a lot snappier and I believe there was some organizational benefits as the company grew.

I am happy that I can click a JIRA link and see a page within a second.

Thats probably dependent on the hardware and size and complexity of workflows and DB size. Our JIRA install is one of the slowest webapps i've seen in a while. Can't wait to move on to something else.

Would you mind sharing the approximate number of issues and active users in your JIRA install?

I'm at a medium/large company, but without access to real numbers i'd say off the top of my head its probably >500 users across 100+ projects and 10s of thousands of issues.

It varies widely. We have ~300 users, 30 projects, probably on the order of ~20k tickets. Performance has been up and down, occasionally things slow way down and we have to file a ticket and then they come back with some excuse about re-indexing or relocating the instance. Normally it's pretty acceptable, but it feels like there are a ton of a variables that go into its performance day-to-day and minute-to-minute.

For me the slowness of JIRA means I loathe going into it. It feels soooo clunky, so 90s in performance and UX. I’m moving to JIRA from trello and it’s night and day. Even something as basic as having a notification inbox with read markers is a paid plugin for JIRA, and everything else seems to require many many clicks (each with their own several second load time). It’s horrible.

Is this self hosted or cloud?

Cloud

That seems bananas to me, because JIRA is literally the most painfully slow application I've ever used in my entire career. We use their hosted version, though.

Do you host your own JIRA instance and have somebody in charge of running/tweaking it?

I have used JIRA only many years ago so I can't compare performance with current Asana. When you say JIRA is slow, is it in comparison with Asana?

trello < pivotal tracker (what we use) < jira

Asana was ridiculously simple when we started using it, and I was incredibly happy with it. Then they kept adding, adding and adding irrelevant things, and now I'm pretty put off by it. I wonder if this is a cycle, and a new 'brand-new asana' alternative will spring up soon.

Page load performance is still a top focus of the company. While page load has improved significantly over the last six months, we know it has a long way to go. Our two largest performance issues are initial HTML time and bundle evaluation time. We're actively working on a solution to both of them.

Those may be your biggest challenges but he is suggesting that even once it is all loaded it is slow. That should probably take priority over initial load time for an application people are likely to keep open all day. Just look at how long gmail takes to load, it is like forever but doesn't matter nearly as much as how quick it is once loaded.

Thanks for pointing that out. Our belief is that the majority of in app actions are now fast but that there are still exceptions. We're constantly trying to find new exceptions and remove them. Hopefully this thread alerts us of new ones.

Curious: What's your strategy for measuring application performance? Would love to hear more details on how you're tracking the effect of your efforts.

At a high level, we try to collect real user metrics for everything we can. Interana helps us analyze that data in near real time. For more detail, I hope we can write a blog post soon to answer your question.

In my personal experience Asana is still the snappiest. I've tried Trello, Basecamp and daily use the monstrosity called JIRA. Asana initial load takes a little while, but it hasn't created any problems for me. I always have Asana pinned in my Firefox.

is it just me or now it runs faster in Firefox than in Chrome?

I also find that it's much faster in Firefox.

There’s now this dev myth that everything is faster in chrome. Not so anymore. I wish more people would take other browsers more seriously. Personally I find safari the fastest on my Mac, and prefer its font rendering as well.

We just started using Asana a couple of months ago, but we're not seeing the performance issues some other folks are mentioning. I just hit Asana full refresh and it took 2-3 seconds to render all of the components in My Tasks. It seems pretty snappy in my opinion. Asana with a few Zaps has been great. Because I know they're watching...could you guys add a calendar view to the iOS app? =)

They should just put a big spinner on the front of the page and asynchronously load everything. Then it'll feel snappy. :rolleyes:

Not asana related (or even working in this area) but this piqued my curiosity, would you be able to answer a couple questions? My contact info is in my profile.

Agreed. We used Asana but I didn't see the point in paying for a slow product.

Switched the Trello. Never been happier.

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