Beyond The Yellow Bubble

I have been working on an application that has a rather complicated form that includes three embedded subforms.  QA testing on unrelated enhancements identified performance issues with this form.  The current production release would load documents with this form in 3 seconds.  The new QA build would load documents with this same form in 30 seconds.  After as series of tests it was found that the subforms were causing the slow perfromance (e.g. taking the fields on the subforms and pasting them into the form made it run much faster).  I did some research and found the following blog suggesting that adding a Print "" statement to the initialize module of the subform.  Sure enough when I did this, my documents were again loading in 3 seconds.  Further testing showed that almost any LotusScript code could be added and have the same effect. 

I settled on adding a Stop statement as this seemed to have less impact on the application.  Subforms are known to have an exponential impact on performance when the number used starts to get large.  But having seen this with just three subforms I am now tempted to add a Stop statement in the Initialize module of ALL my subforms from now on to improve the performance.  It is somewhat ironic that Stop means Go!!