Poor Slow Performance with Experience Builder

[TD1]

Created an Experience Builder app based on the same map/data that a WAB app was using. WAB is very quick panning/zooming but the Experience Builder app is painfully slow. 

We all pay good money for these tools and this is unacceptable.

This needs to be resolved ASAP as users don't want to use the app as its slower on the supposed "new and improved" Experience Builder

[TD1]

@Jianxia still slow at initial load. After layers load a little bit better when panning/zooming but still not great. Still not at performance parity with WAB. Still needs improvements.

Not considered resolved.

[berniejconnors]

I agree.  I am in the same boat.  We are migrating WAB apps to ExB.  We have published one so far and I have several users complaining they cannot get the ExB app to load.  I suspect it all comes down to WebGL support.  Hardware with weaker support for WebGL will have a harder time running ExB apps.

ExB app - https://geonb.snb.ca/geonb/index.html

WAB app - https://geonb.snb.ca/geonb/index_orig.html

Our primary goal in creating the ExB app was to maintain a similar layout between the WAB app and the ExB app.  I think we did a good job with the layout but we still have users complaining about problems running the ExB versions.

In my opinion, this issue is exacerbated if the audience for your app is the Public.  We cannot dictate hardware requirements to the Public.  Just imagine, you have been using a WAB app for 5 or more years, and all of a sudden it is replaced with an ExB app and it will no longer run on your computer.

Bernie.

[ericsamson_tract]

I think this is part of the problem. I have a powerful machine, and your experience builder app works well (awesome work btw, looks and feels great).

I have people in my organization with weaker machines in different departments, and they call me and say they can barely use the GIS, when they could use the WAB version fine.

[berniejconnors]

@Jianxia Would it be possible to have an option in ExB to limit the published app to basic graphics with the hopes of supporting users with weaker hardware?  The most advanced graphics operation we allow in our ExB is map rotation.  We do not provide any web scenes or 3D views.  Just basic 2D maps.

Bernie.

[TD1]

 @ericsamson_tract  you are correct you shouldn't need a supercomputer to run a cloud based application. Key being CLOUD based. One major point of the cloud is to have all or most processing done on the cloud rather than user desktop or at least optimize for user PC performance.

We have avoided transitioning to EXB as most of our users can't run it existing apps that run perfectly fine on WAB. I'm not going to go out and spend thousands of dollars on replacing PCs just because ESRI can't optimize EXB. It worked before on WAB so it needs to work on EXB simple as that.

[TD1]

@Jianxia Still stand by the idea that WAB must not be retired until Experience Builder performance issues and other limitations are resolved.

[jdshore]

Similarly, we have many WAB instances and are transitioning them over to ExpB. Users are finding that particularly polygon type map image layers, hosted from a PostgreSQL dbase, are drawing VERY slowly. User feedback is very poor. They want the functionality of WAB. I understand that ESRI may have built ExpB to be a great tool when real time data feeds are needed. We do not yet have a great need for this type of information in the maps we build, and if we do, it has a limited use. PLEASE bring back the functionality of WAB. We are losing interest from our web based customers. 

[berniejconnors]

To help my users understand their problem running ExB apps I have created a test page for WebGL 2.0:

WebGL Capability & Performance Test

It is a single page web app - HTML, CSS, and JS all in one html file and its only 376 lines.  If you would like to use it with your users please copy the source code to your own web server.  It's licensed under the "Unlicense".

Bernie.

[berniejconnors]

By the way, I have an Acer laptop I purchased for $500 in 2016.  It will run ExB apps just fine.  It make me wonder - "How long do people wait before they upgrade their computers??"

[berniejconnors]

Here is my understanding of the problem.  The ArcGIS JS 4.x API requires WebGL 2.0 support on the end user's hardware.  To run WebGL 2.0 efficiently a GPU is required:

• Older systems that do not have drivers or hardware (GPU) to support WebGL 2.0 will not be able to load an ExB app. 
• Systems that have a driver to support WebGL 2.0 but do not have a GPU will attempt to emulate a GPU with the CPU and perform very, very poorly.

Our solution was to publish an ExB app but to also retain our old WAB app to support users with old hardware.  We placed several warnings in the WAB app related to deprecated software.  Currently, about 9.7% of our users are still using the WAB app.

Bernie.