Maitland Explains Performance Enhancements in MEX V15

In this article we will take a look at what the MEX R&D team has been working on for the latest release. It’s an exciting time because we’ve been working on PERFORMANCE and this is something everyone will benefit from and immediately see the difference.

Continuously Pushing the Limitations of MEX

One of our major philosophies in R&D is to continuously push the limitations of MEX and make it faster, sleeker and overall a much smoother experience for you, the customer. Even the smallest improvement in speed over a work day can add up.

Take driving to work for example, one day you find a short cut that takes five minutes off your drive. If you do this every work day for a year, you gain an extra 40 hours to spend time with your loved ones, relax and enjoy life. The same idea applies to MEX. We want you to focus on what matters – instead of waiting around stuck in traffic.

More Efficient Data Transfer

Continuing with the car metaphor, not only have we provided a shorter route to your destination, but we’ve improved your car’s fuel economy. It’s up to 10x more efficient. In technical terms, all the communication from the MEX Server to the client is up to 10x smaller.

This is really cool because it allows those with iPads out in the field with 4G or 3G to use drastically less data and see a performance increase in up to 15x what we had before. Since the data sizes are a lot smaller, it also means older devices which don’t have as much beef, feel a lot less strain and operate as smooth as an old hot knife through butter.

Universal Performance Improvements

These performance improvements aren’t only for v15. They carry across to Dashboard, Ops and the MEX iOS app in a flash – just update and you get the benefits. No additional assembly required.

Like all great topics, performance isn’t simple. There are so many factors we have to take into consideration. We’ve done the absolute best we can from our side for now – and there are also things which you can do on your side, even if you don’t have MEX 15 or the latest version.

Better Manage Your Listings

The more data the server is sending down, the slower it’s going to get. So, you have to think about how you’re using MEX

• Do you really need to pull down 10,000 work orders every time you enter the listing?
• Or do you realistically only work on, 10, 50 or even 100 at a time?

Going into the Hamburger Menu -> Options and changing the Default Listing show count can do wonders for your performance. Then you can lock this field down through security to ensure no one else is blocking up the system.

Take a note of Columns Added

Be mindful of any columns added through Add Listing Columns as well, especially those which are within an Extension node. These will add overhead. Only add columns which you really need and limit the amount of records you are pulling down.

However, even with the overhead of Add Listing Columns, we know you guys love to use them anyway. We’ve also greatly optimized add listing columns on top of our other performance improvements. Improvement here is ridiculous, with some big listings tested and going from 25 seconds down to a measly 3 seconds to show the listing and all its content.

We have some great articles on how you can improve performance, including setting the Show Last X Months, using a range, optimizing images and efficient ways of finding data. Check them out, you won’t be disappointed: Performance tweaks you can make in MEX

Optimising your Server Setup

Your setup of the MEX server can also adversely affect your performance. On our Data Hosting platform, we have specifically fine-tuned MEX to perform at its best. This includes optimizing your database to suit how you specifically use MEX, something much harder to do when you’re outside of our hosting platform. If you want

• Guaranteed better performance
• Worldwide availability
• No grumpy IT guys
• and 99% uptime

Contact our sales department at sales@mex.com.au for more information.

If you can’t go to hosting, one thing guaranteed to improve performance in your MEX Setup is to ensure Dynamic Compression is enabled on your web server. Talk to your IT about this, it’s a pretty drastic improvement. Have a read of the Enable Dynamics Compression in MEX guide.

We are always continuing to look for ways to improve the performance of MEX. Stay tuned for the next release which includes a much-improved reporting platform with new features, interactivity, search-ability, faster generation with less load on the server. It’s an exciting year for MEX and it will only get better.

If you find any areas in MEX you believe could be faster, please let us know. We are eager to please and your feedback helps us deliver the best product we can.

If you have any questions about these Performance Enhancements in MEX 15, please contact our support team at support@mex.com.au or call +61 7 3392 4777