Why is Chrome always waiting for psx.pndsn.com?

Raphi Levine April 11, 2019

JIra Pndsn Wait.png

When trying to use Jira Cloud (on Mac) in latest Chrome, it is painfully slow (especially when doing screen share with skype).

I noticed that the browser is always showing on the bottom left that it is waiting for psx.psdsn.com (where x is some number, different ones at different times).

What is this psdsn and where is it coming from?  (I had a slack plugin which I disabled and didn't help, I have a bitbucket plugin). 

Does anyone know what is the source of this wait and what it is doing?  

4 answers

1 accepted

3 votes
Answer accepted
bmcalary
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
August 30, 2021

Hello everyone,

Ben from Atlassian here.

If there is any slowness it is not from pndsn (Pubnub) domains.

The reason the browser is reporting "Waiting on..." for this domain is because it is a service Atlassian products use for live in-product updates e.g. "X has updated this Jira" or "Y has commented on this Confluence page" and it uses something called "long polling" where the response is intentionally delayed by the server until there is something for the server to say. This helps avoid too many back and forth messages. But unfortunately, the browser reports that the domain is being "waited on".

You can find more details here:

https://www.pubnub.com/docs/connections/connection-management

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/63464878/does-pubnub-heartbeat-interval-has-an-impact-on-memory

 

Slowness in Jira and Confluence is a problem we acknowledge and is being worked on in many areas such as our networking, our use of CDN, Javascript frontend, etc. We have devoted significant resources to it internally and continue to do so. But in this case, Pubnub is not a contributor.

Raphi Levine November 25, 2021

Thank you @bmcalary for clarifying that.

H

I must say that hearing that Atlassian recognizes that performance is a MASSIVE issue and is working on it is not very comforting. This is a BIG issue and has been for quite some time.  If they are indeed working on it, they are doing a TERRIBLE job.  It still is nothing less than HORRIBLE.  There are some days where it actually works quite well, but most of the time it is slower than a snail.

Atlassian is wasting their time building out new useless functionalities.  I mean seriously, if your product sucks, is there any point in making the side Navigation a little more aesthetically pleasing with collapsible panels.  I mean really, who really cares about that?  Or new UI patterns.

You can have the best software, and I love the Jira product, but it does not perform well and is a HUGE time waster for me.

I have had numerous calls with the Atlassian Team and provided them videos and browser diagnostics. It is still terrible!!

It needs to be completely rearchitected with a concentration given to performance.  Unfortunately, setting up CDN's is not what is going to fix this issue.

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3 votes
Andy Heinzer
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
April 18, 2019

Hi Raphi,

I have to admit I don't know the exact source here.  However I was searching that address and I came across the Whois lookup for that address.  It appears to be a service called pubnub.  Which just appears to be a service for running various apps.   To the best of my knowledge this is not a service that Jira Cloud uses directly.

However it seems likely that either your Atlassian Cloud site or possibly your browser itself, could be running some plugin or add-on that might be utilizing that address for some service.  

Can you recreate this in another browser like Firefox?  If not, that would tend to indicate it is Chrome specific in some way.

If that doesn't help, perhaps generating a HAR file might give us more insights into the specific resources on the page that are being requested by the browser.

I hope this helps.

Andy

Raphi Levine April 18, 2019

Thanks for the response Andy.

I have tried other browsers and have found that it is slow too.  (Opera and Safari).

I'm not sure if I noticed that it is waiting on this service or not.  I can try that again and pay attention for this.

However, I must say that I am open to the fact that it may be some Chrome plugin, but it only happens in Jira.  I have many different tabs open and I don't expire this on any other site.

wojciech.olszewski August 20, 2019

It happens to me but even on in the incognito session without any active Chrome plugins. Moreover this bug also occurring while I'm using Jira via Safari browser so I don't think that problem is related to Google Chrome only.

raphilevine August 20, 2019

It is a Jira issue and Jira is a memory hog.  I've tested with numerous browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera) and they all have this issue.

Jira gets slow and unresponsive.  I had an older Mac and it was absolutely terrible.  I've since upgraded to a $2500 Macbook and it did get better, but it is definitely a problem. I have no plugins in other browsers (I only use it with firefox for now) and it consumes tons of memory (I don't close my browser always keep it open).  I ensure not to have more than just a couple of tabs open to Jira.

Jira performance leaves MUCH to be desired (at least the cloud version).  It is horrible. 

The scrum board also keeps hanging.  Dragging and dropping the cards at times has lag.  The User Stories don't always paint correctly.  Many times the Swimlane labels (status in my case) don't stay at the top and paint in middle of the page and cover tickets.  Sometimes not all the tickets display and I have to refresh the browser window. 

It is just not a great tool.  It has a lot of great functionality.  If only it worked great, and was quick and responsive as most modern day web apps....... 

Oh How I love to dream....

Like Deleted user likes this
Joshua Balsillie November 15, 2019

I've also experienced this.

Upon further investigation pndsn.com is registered by Amazon, possibly alluding to the fact that Jira uses AWS just like most enterprise businesses.

In the search functionality using Chrome there are a ton of XMLHttpRequest errors every time you select a different Jira story.

Jira is also using a lot of deprecated code from all the warnings reported in Chrome. I have over 1000 Chrome messages just from clicking through the first page of search items.

From a web development perspective, Jira Cloud will likely only worsen in the coming year.

Deleted user November 15, 2019

This is happening for us too and it almost to the point of being unusable. It is really slowing down our productivity and we have lost work from the system timing out. From reading the thread it sounds like there is no solution and it is a code issue. Is that your conclusion? Do you know of any work around? We have reached out to Atlassian support but they just say they cannot replicate the issue.

Raphi Levine November 15, 2019

@[deleted]  I have not come up with a solution.  Jira cloud is terrible.  I manage multiple remote Dev Teams and everyone is constantly complaining about the performance and lack of responsiveness.  I recently bought a new MacBook Pro (for $2500, so it is a pretty solid machine) and Jira works much better with it.  I must say that I didn't have issues with other websites.  Jira is a memory hog!!!!  If you have a couple of different browser tabs open to Jira tickets or boards, it can bring your browser to a hault.  Open the memory profiler (either on Mac or windows) and you will see that the browsers with Jira as hogging the memory. 

Atlassian is making a HUGE mistake by investing in the new changes and updates to Jira as opposed to investing in redesigning and rearchitecting the existing site.  As of now they own the market space and they probably don't feel the need to change (don't care about their customers experience).  IMHO, This will ultimately be the impetus for their downfall.  Somebody will come out with a better solution and they will loosed market share.  There are already other players in the market (Monday, Gemini from Counter Soft and others). Agreeable that they are not as widely used or popular as Jira, yet. But that will certainly change in the near future.

My prediction, Jira will fail, unless Atlassian very quickly changes their view and starts recognizing their faults and issues. The demise of Jira is imminent.

My advice to Atlassian. Wake up! Smell the coffee!! Listen to your customers. Spend your money wisely or you will become a Blackberry!!!

Like Jim Grill likes this
Victor Burgos November 24, 2019

HELP! JIRA CLOUD IS SO SLOW... I see the same thing... ps11.psdsn.com

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0 votes
Kim Ostler February 21, 2020

I had a similar problem when trying to edit a Jira issue using Chrome.  I saw the waiting message in the status bar, no Save or Cancel buttons displayed below the Issue Description edit box and no message on the screen to give any hints as to why. It just hung and seemed periodic so hard to determine the cause. 

Today, the situation occurred again right after I added a PR link to the story and this time a 'not authorized' message appeared.  I confirmed that was causing the hang by using Safari to remove the PR link and I could edit again in Chrome.  It turns out the hang occurred when Jira was trying to get the status of the PR but couldn't b/c of an authorization issue.  My company uses SSO for both Atlassian/Jira and Github and the connected app in Github needed to be reauthorized (hard to tell the real reason).

Steps to fix:
- revoke the connected Atlassian account in Github
- log out of Jira (and Github just in case)
- restart the browser (Chrome)
- login to Jira using SSO
- add a PR link into a story to force login to Github

That crashed Jira but when I got back into Jira, the PR status was displayed and I'm now able to edit that Jira issue.

This issue has been causing me headaches for a while now so I hope this post helps others in the same situation.

0 votes
RH4 December 18, 2019

I blocked pndsn.com, WP.com, cloudfront.net and workpress.com as these are the ones that my Jira always seems to be waiting for.   Doing so caused a noticeable improvement in speed although not near as much as I hoped for.

These appear to not be needed for anything I have tried so far but they might be so try at your own risk.

Rant; When you think about it, we are paying for service so why would a legitimate company build in all these redirects for everything you do on their web pages to outside companies that specialize in tracking? 

Besides slowing us down, something doesn't seem right.  If I was cynical, I would suggest they are doing so to get cheaper server time etc by using tracking companies to provide the services and they don't care that the trackers are selling our clicks.  On that line, what value could they possibly gain to know that I rejected 27 stories and 12 bugs last week and our company finished a release on time.  Maybe there is marketing value in there for the future, IDN.

Joshua Balsillie April 1, 2020

Had an issue where my Notifications panel would call pndsn.com and never load the notifications.

Blocking pndsn.com in Chrome via Settings > Site settings > Insecure Content > Block 'pndsn.com' does not seem to resolve the issue.

If I open Jira in Microsoft Edge it doesn't have this issue, but there are other Jira UI issues that I believe may be unique to Edge.

@RH4 

I know from a UX perspective that tracking clicks helps designers identify UI issues and developers identify bugs. It is unlikely that they are "selling our clicks" and more likely that the leading browsers don't like the way these tracking apps are functioning, like using too many calls, deprecated code or insecure operations.

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