SugarCrm missed mustard, passes gas
August 29th, 2008 RustyI hate to be critical and negative but someone ought to benefit from the half day I lost evaluating a tool that stinks like yesterday’s chili at breakfast.
I installed SugarCRM yesterday as it appeared to be the tool for Crm in the Open Source space. I was also excited that it supports MS SQL Server. I liked the idea of being able to use my comfort tools for digging through the data.
When I launched the app, I noticed that it was pathetically slow. I mean, s l o w . . .
I tried all my tricks to speed it up but the reality is that there are just too many huge include files. The server tends to respond in less than 10 seconds for the most complicated pages (less than 1 second for some) but no page loads in less than 6. Most pages take more than 30 seconds!
Using firebug, I measured the download of several pages. I installed on Windows IIS using SQL Server with the demo data installed. I was the only user hitting the server.
I clicked on "Create New Opportunity" and the page note indicated: "Server response time: 2.54 seconds." However, the icons and images took more than 20 seconds to finish loading.
Granted, I could probably have used the page after ten seconds but that is far too long to wait considering I expect early users to have to click a few times to find what they are looking for. 3 clicks at 30 seconds is not acceptable.3 clicks at 60 is completely unmanageable.
I tried clicking on Dashboard and "Server response time: 12.48 second" but the page took more than 60 seconds to display content.
I tried to reindex tables and set content expiration on the themes and includes directory but this didn’t help much at all.
Using Firebug, loading the "Emails" default tab, the total is:
140 requests 2.25 MB (0 b from cache) 33.8s
That is HUGE. a plain refresh results in: 39.77s
Oucharama!
I am now trying vTigerCrm…
perhaps salesforce.com is worth $9/user/mo? Probably!