Thanks to Gautam Vasudev and Jason Ding for inspiring this blog!
The Salesforce Agent Console commonly known as the Salesforce Console was designed for high volume call center Agents (Tier 1 customer service/ Tier 2 & 3 product support). The console enables to streamline customer support by boosting agent productivity. The Service Cloud Console has now evolved with numerous features and provides enhanced capabilities that can be used in both sales and service use cases, in fact any domain where the user wants to look at or edit multiple records simultaneously. The Salesforce console provides a tabbed environment; this primary and secondary tabbed framework helps facilitate the multi record view during agent operations.
This blog is primarily to demonstrate the behavior of the console in different browsers with focus on performance from an agent perspective. Typically agents open and close multiple primary and secondary tabs during the course of their day. This blog will help compare the performance of the console in different browsers. I have focused on the primary metrics that are important from an end user perspective when using the console on a day-to-day basis. Consecutively, I have focused on the console load times in the browser and the browser memory consumption by the console.
Let’s consider a typical use case where an agent has ~10 tabs open (primary + secondary). The numbers stated in this blog were observed when all the common out of the box features for the Console were enabled. Our focus will be on Internet Explorer 7, 8 and 9; Firefox (v21) and Google Chrome (v30). This selection of browsers is primarily because most of the console users across the globe are using these browsers.
Scenario 1: First Views and Repeat Views
‘First View’ implies first time load of the console and ‘Repeat View’ implies a refresh / second time load of the console. The load for the console implies the least amount of time before which a user can start interacting with the console.
The numbers below are averaged over several iterations.
Browser
First View
Repeat View
IE7
~5 sec
~3 sec
IE8
~3.5 sec
~0.5 sec
IE9
~3.8 sec
~0.8 sec
Firefox (v21)
~4 sec
~3 sec
Chrome (v30)
~1.9 sec
~1.5 sec
These numbers indicate that except for IE7, the console behaves almost similarly in all the other browsers with respect the load times.
Scenario 2: Memory utilization
In the next section of this blog, we will focus on the browser memory utilization in correlation with the console.
Contact center agent machines come in all types of configurations. At the lower end of the spectrum they have limited memory and processing power. For efficient performance of the machines, it is essential that all the process running on the machine consume the least possible amount of memory.
During the course of the day, agents open and close several tabs iteratively in a day after the agent console is once loaded at the beginning of the day. One would ideally assume that as agents open and close tabs, all the memory consumed by the browser corresponding to the console tabs would be free when the open tabs are closed. Though this is the ideal behavior, most of the browsers do not free up the memory consumed by open tabs after they are closed. This results in iteratively increasing memory consumption by the browser affecting the system performance.
The numbers below depict how the memory consumption of the browser fluctuated for console use cases for different browsers.
Browser
Memory utilization prior to starting the console
Memory utilization with fully loaded console (~12 tabs)
Memory utilization after closing the open tabs in the console
IE7
~40 MB
~540 MB
~350 MB
IE8
~38 MB
~330 MB
~245 MB
IE9
~80 MB
~255 MB
~180 MB
Firefox (v21)
~63 MB
~248 MB
~185 MB
Chrome (v30)
~21 MB
~150 MB
~30 MB
Scenario 3: Memory Utilization with 300 tabs
On a typical day, every agent once logged into the console opens and closes multiple tabs iteratively. Under the assumption that on an average day, every agent would spend a minimum of ~1.5 mins working on any tab before closing the tab, typically agents would open and close a maximum of ~300 tabs a day. This section depicts the observations on the browser memory consumption behavior when opening and closing 300 tabs in the console without reloading/refreshing the browser console window.
Browser
Memory utilization prior to starting the tab load in the console
Memory utilization after opening and closing ~ 300 tabs
IE7
~ 119 MB
~ 420 MB
IE8
~ 105 MB
~ 780 MB
IE9
~ 85 MB
~ 382 MB
Firefox (v21)
~ 124 MB
~ 200 MB
Chrome (v30)
~ 30 MB
~ 50 MB
Considering these results it is seen that Google Chrome Browser has been built with efficient memory management techniques and has in-built code/JavaScript optimization methodologies which result in better page load times. It is evident that Google Chrome provides the most efficient console performance, in all respects.
Going forward, it is always going to be the console in the Google chrome web browser for me!