Top Salesforce Performance Issues and How to Mitigate Them
The article outlines five common performance problems affecting Salesforce SaaS deployments—location latency, bandwidth competition from multimedia traffic, low‑quality bandwidth, ineffective caching, and heavy plugin usage—and provides practical mitigation strategies for IT teams to ensure reliable user experiences.
Salesforce is a heavyweight in the SaaS market, and its issues can affect thousands of users. While many rely on the online status dashboard at trust.salesforce.com to monitor application health, it only shows internal infrastructure status and does not reveal the full delivery path conditions.
Top Salesforce Issues
The following are the five major performance problems we observe in enterprise SaaS services like Salesforce:
1. Location‑Specific Issues
Salesforce operates 174 instances worldwide (as of July 2018), with 56 in North America. The physical distance and network hops to the chosen instance significantly impact performance; even 20‑30 ms latency can accumulate across many objects on a page, degrading user experience.
Most SaaS providers do not let you choose the instance location, but Salesforce does—select the instance nearest to your users for optimal performance.
2. Underestimating Entertainment Traffic Impact
Employees now carry devices that stream high‑definition video and audio over corporate Wi‑Fi, consuming bandwidth needed by critical apps like Salesforce. Creating a separate wireless network for personal devices and using MAC‑address filtering can isolate traffic and preserve bandwidth for business applications.
3. Low‑Quality Bandwidth
Investing in more bandwidth alone often does not improve Salesforce performance; the quality of the connection matters. Even a 3‑5% packet loss can dramatically degrade the user experience. Ensure the ISP link meets strict tolerance levels and consider upgrading from residential to business‑grade circuits.
4. Ineffective Caching
Salesforce delivers large JavaScript and CSS bundles (3‑5 MB) that can be slow to download, especially when packet loss occurs. Enabling network‑level caching and storing derivative caches locally can accelerate these large file transfers and improve overall user experience.
5. Plugin Usage
Typical Salesforce customers use around seven third‑party plugins, which can consume significant bandwidth and affect performance. Evaluate each plugin’s impact using synthetic transactions that measure the full end‑user experience, not just Salesforce’s core functionality.
Monitoring these areas helps IT teams locate, avoid, and resolve Salesforce performance problems, ensuring the underlying infrastructure delivers a high‑quality experience. At AppNeta we have dedicated extensive effort to building tools that detect such issues before they impact users.
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