Microsoft 365 Community SharePoint, 13 Oct 2020

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From YouTube: Performance improvements and preview on Project Nucleus

Description

In this 18-minute Developer - focused demo, Microsoft Program Manager Andrey Esipov introduces viewers to Project Nucleus. Nucleus will be powering the next generation of OneDrive and SharePoint (ODSP) web applications focusing on performance, local installation, seamless updates and basic offline capabilities. The focus is quickly rendering fully interactive content using modern Microsoft Edge and Chromium based browsers. Project Nucleus integration with Microsoft Lists is shown in a demo and a Private Preview is announced. This PnP Community demo is taken from the SharePoint (PnP) Community call – October 2020 – Monthly sync call recorded on October 13, 2020.

Demo Presenter:
• Andrey Esipov – Program Manager (Microsoft)

Supporting materials:
• Project Nucleus Private Preview | http://aka.ms/nucleuspreview

Learn more:
• Learn more about the Microsoft 365 Patterns and Practices community at: http://aka.ms/m365pnp
• Visit the Microsoft 365 Patterns and Practices community YouTube channel: https://aka.ms/m365pnp-videos

A

All right so yeah, so I wanted to spend a few minutes just talking about how we approach web application performance in onedrive and sharepoint web applications.

A

um So we'll specifically touch on you know the two topics. So how do we approach web app perf across the web apps? What are some of the primary metrics that we use to track, whether we're improving performance or not, and talk a little bit about our goals? And finally, we'll conclude with project nucleus?

A

So I'll do a few live demos and then I'll have an exciting announcement to share at the end as well, so like what is performance so before we dive into the presentation, I want to make sure that you understand what we define by by performance.

A

So when we talk about making our web applications fast, what do we mean? So the truth is that performance is is relative. Obviously so, for example, you can consider two different scenarios, so there's two web applications and then they finish loading at the exact same time, one application might seem to load faster if it loads content progressively, rather than waiting until the end to display anything right or another scenario could be a web. App might be faster for one user, that's on a fast network.

A

You know on a powerful device and can be slow for another user. That's on the slow network with the low end device um and the web app might appear to load quickly, but then respond slowly or not at all to use interaction. So this is kind of simple scenarios to keep in mind uh when I can continue talking about uh performance and the work that we're doing in wonder and sharepoint, uh and we always we always talk in terms of objective criteria.

A

When we talk about performance that can be essentially quantitatively measured and importantly, it can be quantitatively measured and consist and be consistent across various sharepoint sharepoint web apps.

A

So with that in mind, so let's take a look at some of the key user moments in loading and interacting with a web application that we're focusing on currently.

A

Fundamentally, our aspiration is to obviously load the page and render the most relevant content to you as the user as fast as possible and to ensure that you, as a user, can interact with that content and that interaction is very smooth and efficient, and so we can think of a page load process comprising of four different stages.

A

So the first stages really corresponds to whether you know the user perceives to be paged to actually load. The next page corresponds to whether the display page uh content is actually useful to the user followed by. Is it actually usable so essentially can use interact with it and finally, are those you know page interactions, seamless and smooth, and we primarily rely on two metrics. So this there's a host of other supplementary metrics that we also track and measure, but we're currently focusing on two two metrics.

A

uh The first one is called first meaningful paint, and it's just a measure of how fast we can paint the most relevant content on the screen and the second one is a measure of page interactivity, which we call uh call as first, first cpu, idle or fci. For short, you can largely think of it as being an analogous to another metric that you might be familiar with. It's called time to interactive, but again it just measures. How can our web pages become interactive?

A

They respond to user input, and so just fundamentally, the two goals that we have is really just to reduce the time to first, meaningful paint essentially show the content on the screen as fast as possible, and essentially minimize the difference between the first meaningful paint and then first cpu idle, and what that really means is that we want to make sure that once the content is displayed on the screen, it's interactive as soon as the user essentially can see it, and we have multiple approaches to measuring web performance.

A

So we rely on web measurements and real user measurements, so lab measurements. Allow us to have a consistent and uh reproducible method for evaluating web perf across you know. Various builds uh and we usually rely on rely on lab measurements as the first line of defense, or you know, for any possible regressions.

A

Ultimately, we rely on real user measurements as the source of truth of how our web apps perform in the wild and ensure that all the users across the globe are reaping the benefits of the work that we're putting into making the web apps faster and specifically we're focusing on two different percentiles when it comes to improving web app performance.

A

uh So we are primarily optimizing for the 75th percentile of our users, because it allows us to understand how the majority of our users experience the web applications on most common types of networks, but we're also focusing on the 95th percentile as well, because it allows us to understand how users, on slower networks or lower end devices, experience the web apps and for us it's very important that we focus on both.

A

uh So now, let's take a look at you know the primary metrics that I just just described, so we use again uh first meaningful paint as the measure of page content load times um and in onedrive and sharepoint web apps we're optimized for rendering of primary content.

A

First, such as you know, the frequent site, sections on sharepoint home or whatever is visible currently in the viewport on you know, in sharepoint sharepoint pages um and the measure, the recording and measurement approaches are slightly different between stat pages, with kind of like static or immutable layout such as you know, sharepoint home and for pages that have you know, dynamic, layout, right and highly customizable, such as such as sharepoint pages.

A

um So again we rely on the same metric, but we recorded it slightly differently, so the first cpu idle metric again, that's a metric that we rely on to measure interactivity of of our web pages um and in essence, um first cpu idle is measured when the the main thread of the browser becomes uh becomes idle. So essentially, there's no there's no tasks, there's no long task that the browser's browser is busy with. So that means that the browser thread is now is now available to reliably respond to to user input.

A

So this metric is very deterministic and allows us to to really understand when the user can actually use use. Use our web applications two primary metric that we that we focus on. But again we have a host of other supplementary metrics that we're also tracking. But our focus is on these two for now.

A

So now, let's take a look at the performance goals that we have for our web applications. So in a nutshell, we are targeting to paint relevant content on the screen across our web apps uh um in two seconds or less at 75th percentile uh and at four seconds or less at 95th percentile across our web. App, so only exception is just just because the the the content is so dynamic um and is largely influenced by you know. Whatever web parts you put on the page.

A

So that's why our goals are a little bit more conservative for sharepoint pages and when it comes to interactivity, we're shooting for three seconds, it's piece uh p75 and six seconds at p95.

A

So these are some of our co-current internal goals and again we we're we're in constant pursuit of making our web apps faster, and once we achieve these goals, we'll I'm sure set more more aggressive targets.

A

And one last thing that I wanted to mention is that the majority of the vast majority of the work that we're putting into making uh our web applications faster, primarily focus on modern browsers.

A

So if you want to reap all the benefits that we're putting into until the perf work, we highly encourage you to move to modern browsers, such as the microsoft edge or the chromium based base browsers, because ie 11 and microsoft edge legacy are being being retired in the middle of next year, so that just kind of something to keep in mind all right. So let's talk about project nucleus.

A

So, if you haven't heard so, project nucleus is uh an exciting new technology that will power the next generation of onedrive and sharepoint web applications.

A

So we're starting um our journey with integrating our project nucleus with microsoft list and I'll show you how it kind of all works, but in a nutshell, project nucleus helps deliver fast and uh smooth experiences um when interacting with the web app and also it makes the web application data available uh to you, regardless of the network state. So you can be on bad connection fast connection.

A

uh The data is always available to you, even even if you're offline, of course um and project nucleus accomplishes this by establishing a very durable cache of the web, app data on your local device and that web update is not just limited to files right, like in the case of onedrive, onedrive, sync client, so we're moving way beyond files here um and then we're syncing. The data with the web app uh using a standard set set of api so same set of apis that are used.

A

You know to sync the web update with the cloud backend and, as a result, you'll be able to get fast, powerful browsing and editing capabilities when you're not even connected to the network and the beauty of project nucleus. Is that we're building it? On top of an extensible framework that will allow different web applications to take advantage of its capabilities, like I said we're, starting with microsoft, lists first, but we will follow it by other odsp web applications.

A

Before I go into the demo, I wanted to kind of cover some of the challenges that motivated us to start working on project nucleus, um so we've started on a journey of transitioning or transforming our web applications to uh become progressive web apps and, while progressive web apps provide. You know great capabilities such as you know, local installation native app like behavior um and offer some.

A

um Yet you know limited offline capabilities um really needed to think beyond progressive web app in order to be able to provide fast access for very large and very complex data. Sets that you find in sharepoint every day um also be able to provide experiences regardless of network connection quality and making sure that all of our users get reliable performance on the periods of heavy use um and again we ultimately wanted to provide a very you know full and comprehensive web app experiences. When you know our users are working with our web apps.

A

You know when fully offline, such as on the train or in a play, so let me switch gears a little bit and show you a demo share. My screen.

A

See, let me know if you can see it.

B

A

Yes, so so what I'm showing here is um a nucleus powered list, so you you can kind of tell that it's you know, there's something special about the list by an indication of a little sync icon over here. So this is a very, very large list, so it has a hundred thousand items in it. So it's just just a sample kind of hardware inventory list that I kind of created just to demonstrate. What's what's possible, we've tried a nucleus with list with up to one one million items and I'm sure we can go even higher.

A

So you know the possibilities are endless as far as supporting very large, very large entities and list lists, and this this example- um and so I just wanted to kind of quickly show, what's happening, what's happening behind the scenes. I'm just going to pop my devtools over here and let's say I wanted to you- know: sort sort this list by the condition column, and so something interesting happens so over here.

A

You can see that we're seeing a bunch of nucleus log lines right and then what actually happened is that when I clicked sort button it didn't go to the service. It went directly to nucleus.

A

So, as you can see, it says call call reader redirected and then it and then shows you the amount of time it took to come to complete the call um and if we look at the network over here, so this particular api is, you know, is the api that does all the heavy heavy lifting when it comes to retrieving data from the service.

A

So this api was actually executed by nucleus, and so, if you, if we take a look at it, you can see that it went to the local host rather to to the sharepoint service and it returned the results in two milliseconds. So instantaneous and again you can continue up. You know continue doing the exact same things that you're used to doing with the list. You can sort columns, you can group columns, you can filter by by uh by different fields and again, nucleus will handle those requests.

A

And again, all of this will work even when, when you're when you're offline.

A

So this was just a quick, quick demo- and I wanted to conclude by um inviting all of you to express your interest in participating in a private private preview of project nucleus.

A

So we would love uh for you to be the first ones to try it out. So all you have to do is go to akms, slash nucleus preview and I'm just asking to fill out some basic form. Just kind of share, share your share information and then share a little bit about some of the scenarios that you currently um go through when working with microsoft lists and some of some of the pain points. So it's it's going to take you two or three minutes to complete um and in a few weeks time.

A

So we will reach out to you with instructions on how you can opt in and start playing around with nucleus and we're really looking forward to your feedback.

B

Yeah before I let you go, I have to get back on this there's a few questions related on chat as expected, questions, which is what about third party, and how are we expecting this to work with sharepoint framework.

A

uh So our aspiration is to definitely open up open uh project nucleus up to third party and to spfx, but it's currently not yet supported, but definitely in the plans. So we'll share more once once we have more concrete, concrete plans in place.

B

A

Definitely just.

B

To recap: on that one not intended to be only for first party experience, and certainly we understand the importance of partners and customers now um well, we do have three minutes.

B

How is the security of cached data insert a question from dragon.

A

Security, I mean it's, we follow the high security practices to make sure that data is only available to you and no but nobody else. So it's all all encrypted.

B

Yeah, so everything is basically obviously the priority is that security is one of the main priorities in microsoft. Always so, therefore, uh we'll take care of that, and there was a few questions related on the during your presentation that partly a joke. I think it was ahmed to chat it and then no, no, no, I was choking and basically saying no. No. This is only for microsoft browsers, but no. No. This is industry standards, uh any browser or other limitations on that.

B

What are the process which will be supported by nucleus, or is it all of the browsers and modern.

A

Browsers yeah, so, for now all modern browsers will will be supported. So you know yeah it'll work on working firefox, um uh but for now, so, if they're enjoying private preview just a few few cables, it's for now it's windows only um and chromium browsers. Only for now uh but again this is this is not the restrictions one. Once once we go ga yeah.

B

Cool cool and that's that's also going to say the new new way- well, not a new way, but that's how we do stuff in microsoft nowadays, which is industry standards, open source, everything open, and we need to do that in the future as well. But I think uh that's pretty much it for now. uh This technical questions from christian, like how many? uh How long does it take to update the information and the list, data back to get visible on the client and all of that?

B

But I think those are technical nuances and all of that is adjustable.

B

So um the intention is that it's everything is handled automatically merging is handled automatically uh and all of that, so you don't have to worry about you as an you. Don't just see what happens in the background. So what's your vehicle, yeah yeah.

A

Yeah right just quickly question to answer it yeah, it's a! uh We follow a notification based based approach. So the moment there is a notification uh that an item has changed will will sync it down or sync it up if it was offline change and.

B

So anna is asking the last question really good one. Can existing list be transformed to be in a nucleus list? An answer is yes, it can it's not even not about the list it's not about when the list has been created. It's all about us taking care of the technology behind the sense, so every single list, the whole web application, potentially modern pages portals everything will be handled by the nucleus in the in the future, but again one step at a time still in preview.

B

We need to reverse stuff first and then ensure that it's 100 fully working across the board and then we're going to release that into.

A