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12.2. HelpSpot Speed and Performance

If you are noticing speed or performance issues within your HelpSpot installation, here are a few places to check on.

Note that these apply to HelpSpot Cloud installations as well.

Updating Requests are Slow (only applies to HelpSpot v4 and below)

If HelpSpot hangs / is slow when updating a request, this is most often related to HelpSpot sending emails when updating the request. This usually happens when a request update sends multiple emails

Multiple email notifications may be sent under a few different conditions:

• Triggers may add an email notification if a condition is met when updating a request
• Any staff who are subscribed to a request will generate an additional email send
• Any staff being notified on a Private or External request update will generate an additional email send

However, some Exchange mail servers intentionally cause delays between sending multiple requests.

Slow Workspace

Sometimes staff see slowness when navigating around the Workspace section of HelpSpot.

This is often related to having many filters defined, or having a filter that results in a "heavy" database query.

Often filters have a count of found requests next to them. HelpSpot has to run the filter in order to get this number, so in some conditions, many filters are being run all at once as users click around the Workspace. This can result in a pile up of expensive database queries.

The filter result count is saved (cached) for up to 5 minutes, however depending on how HelpSpot is used, the cached count may get invalidated often enough to cause slowness within HelpSpot.

HelpSpot admins can check on what filters may be causing issues in Admin > System > Filter Management. Problem filters will often be highlighted in red. These are ones whose database queries take over 1 second to complete.

The query time is an average, so seeing something take over 1 second often means many queries are taking longer. Query time may vary depending on the current load against the HelpSpot database.

To reduce issues caused by filters, you can:

1. Delete unused or rarely-used filters
2. Remove the option to show the request count next the filter ("Display count in Workspace" option)
3. Reduce the number of people who can see a filter
4. Reduce filters to only query within certain times or filter down to more specific sets of requests (this often helps but has potential to make the queries take longer! Test your filters with the "Run Filter" button before saving them).