Best Performing Browser For SugarCRM Award Goes To…IE???

We ran a performance benchmark for browsers running SugarCRM, and Internet Explorer came out with the best results.You must be saying, Hey, wait a minute, Internet Explorer??? Come on, you must be doing something wrong..Firefox is much better, and  Safari.. Well, we must admit we were surprised, but these are the results, we rechecked everything, and IE is the winner! The benchmark focused on communication between the browser and the SugarCRM server. Future benchmarks will measure rendering time of the pages returned from the Sugar server, and provide a more complete view on browser performance.

Benchmark Setup

We installed SugarCRM 5.2a Community Edition (we used the Linux binary installer) on an Ubuntu 8.04 machine. The hardware used to run sugar is an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 3800+ CPU, with 2GB of RAM. The client machine, where we ran all the different browsers, was a windows XP on an Intel core 2  Duo @ 3.16 GHz, with 2GB of RAM machine. We used Webload from Radview to perform out performance tests.  We tested 3 browsers:

  • Microsoft Internet Explorer  7
  • Firefox 3
  • Apple Safari

Business Scnerio

The following business scenario was used for the performance testing:

  1. Login to SugarCRM
  2. Create a new contact
  3. List all Accounts
  4. Browse to last page in the accounts list
  5. Search for all accounts with a search string ‘a’
  6. View details of first result return by the search in step 6
  7. Logout of SugarCRM

Benchmark Process

Under each browser, we ran all steps of the business scenario outlined above. We then let Webload emulate the browsers for us, running 4 separate test for each browser, rebooting both the server and the client before each test run. In total, 12 runs were made. We measured a host of parameters, but focused our attention on two: response time and receive time. Without going into too many details, these parameters indicated how well the the browser communicates with the SugarCRM server. The lower the results - the better the communication.
Please remember that this test does not take into account the time each browser takes to render the page returned by the SugarCRM server. Different browsers use different rendering engines and rendering time is an important parameter in determining overall browser performance. 

Results

Internet explorer was the fastest performing browser in the benchmark we conducted. Average response time for SugarCRM page requests (the more important parameter) was 0.1245 seconds, and average receive time was 0.0633. Firefox came in second with 0.258 and 0.056, respectively, and apple Safari finished last. Although IE registered the slowest recieve time, its Response time values were much better than other browsers. The results are summarized in the charts below:

Chart 1: Response time, in seconds, by browser

Chart 2: Recieve time, in seconds, by browser

Conculsion

This is the first of several Sugarcrm benchmarks Open Source Crm Guru plans to conduct. This benchmark provides a partial answer to the question ”which browser is best for SugarCRM“. The results today put Internet explorer in first place, but look for additional benchmark and final conclusions in upcoming posts. Register to our RSS feed to get the latest Sugarcrm benchmarks and news.

February 23, 2009 · Filed Under SugarCRM

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Comments

4 Responses to “Best Performing Browser For SugarCRM Award Goes To…IE???”

  1. Roder on February 23rd, 2009 1:24 pm

    I’m not sure that this is the best benchmarking test. From the way I understand your benchmark process, you are measuring from initial request to full page load. If you were to measure only the speed of rendering in the browser, you’d have to subtract network & server time.

    Factors like opt-code caching on PHP can affect performance on the server as well. Also, it depends on how you have your webserver set up as well.

    Also, you should consider doing some browser tests focused around the Javascript tests on the Email client and in Studio/Module Builder.

  2. osscrmguru on February 24th, 2009 12:27 am

    Hi Roder,
    Please keep in mind that this benchmark is just one of several we plan to run, and I completely agree that this benchmark alone might not reflect much.
    There are many factors - both client side and server side - that effect performance that you can never bring all of the into account.
    To make sure the results are accurate, we restarted both the client machine and the SugarCRM server machine, so that caching mechanism does not make our results inaccurate.
    The ultimate purpose of these benchmarks is to oublish a performance optimization guide for SugarCRM, and the results of the first benchmarks will be treated as baseline. Identical benchmarks will be used to understand the influence of different parameters (opt-code caching in PHP, for example) on SugarCRM performance.

  3. nick on May 18th, 2009 1:23 am

    Hey what about chrome? Was thinking of switching our users to chrome for speed ….

  4. admin on May 21st, 2009 7:52 am

    Nick - Chrome has a very strong Javascript rendering engine and is very light (in term of memory consumption in the client side). I would consider switching, but make sure that all UI elements are rendered properly.

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