Diagnosing Performance Issues

What to do if you are experiencing performance issues with your ftrack Review site?

There may be several different reasons behind the performance issues of your ftrack Review site.

To diagnose what might be the cause, we need to understand the troubles you are having properly, please follow the below checklist.

1. Check the status of the ftrack services

The first thing to check is if there are any announced disruptions or ongoing maintenance via the ftrack Status Page.

The ftrack team announces known issues and maintenance windows through this service, and if there is anything ongoing, it may be contributing to performance problems. If the page displays any ongoing issues, please wait for the service to return to normal to see if that address the problem.

2. Ensure your web browser is up to date

We test all our products with Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla,  Firefox and recommend using only the 3 latest versions of these browsers. Please ensure you are using the latest version of the respective browser.

How to get help from our team?

If the ftrack service is operational and you are using an up-to-date browser, then please open a support ticket via support@ftrack.com.

Please ensure you include the following information in order for our team to diagnose the performance issue appropriately.

Where possible, please include screenshots or screen recordings that clearly demonstrate the performance issue. Please also supply any URLs to affected pages.

• Does the issue only appear within your current network (i.e if you temporarily connect to an outside 4/5G cellular network, does the same issue occur?

• Is the issue consistent (i.e it occurs after the same set of steps), or does it appear inconsistently? (i.e at random intervals or unexpectedly)

• Does the issue occur across multiple machines, or is it happening only with specific devices?

• Does the the issue affects all the users using ftrack products, or only specific users?

  • Extra points if you provide us with the name/s of the affected user/s)

• Do you see any Error messages?

  • Please elaborate and confirm what error message you see?

  • At what point while using ftrack Review do you receive the error (ie when the user logs in, on a specific page, etc)?

  • If possible, please attach a screenshot of the error.

• If you are experiencing slowness on your site?

  • Is the slowness experienced across the whole ftrack Review site, or is it only slow on specific pages?

  • Is the slowness experienced when viewing media in a Review session?

  • Are the slowdowns happening during specific time periods of the day?

    • Please provide a rough timeframe if possible.

  • Are any significant production processes happening at that time of the day?

  • Are you having issues with uploading and transcoding media taking a long time?

    • Please let our team know what type of media you are trying to upload, including the specifications of the problematic file ( Frame size, Codec and container, Frame rate, File size in MB).

    • If possible, please attach the problematic file.

How to troubleshoot if the audio won't play in ftrack Review while using the Safari web browser?

1. Browse to your ftrack instance

2. Go to Safari > Settings

3. Select ‘Websites’ from the top menu, then Auto-Play on the left-hand side menu

4. Select your ftrack instance from the list, and change the dropdown menu to ‘Allow All Auto-Play’

5. Refresh your ftrack page to ensure the setting change has been applied.

How to troubleshoot if the audio won't play in ftrack Review while using the Chrome web browser?

As of Chrome (version TBA), the automatic playback of audio is controlled by a new browser setting.  

The default setting may stop audio from playing back immediately / without page interaction for reviews with audio media.

We can see this behavior occur when a review with audio media is loaded and before there is direct user action, eg. when the spacebar is pressed to play the audio media.

[screen recording of autoplay not working can be provided on request]

To change the relevant setting, open Settings in the Chrome menu 

or navigate to the Settings page at chrome://settings/

Within Settings, open the page for Privacy and security and then the Site settings section highlighted here:

Within the Site settings section, open the item for Additional content settings and then the section for Sound highlighted here:

and then the section for Sound highlighted here:

In the Sound settings, the Default behaviour is either Sites can play sound or Don’t allow sites to play sound.  If the setting does now allow sites to play sound, we can add an exception to allow your ftrack / Review site to allow sound to play immediately / without direct interaction.

To do this, in the section for Allowed to play sound section, click the Add button and then specify the Site as [*.]ftrackapp.com as shown:

With this setting added, audio media will play at the initial load time when the spacebar is pressed.

[screen recording of autoplay correctly working can be provided on request]