[SalesForce] Are sandboxes slower than production Orgs

I've noticed quite often that sandbox instances are showing a slower performance during Metadata API and Tooling API access. Today this happened on cs14.

The force.com IDE froze completely during a "Metadata Refresh" and CodeFusion took about 100 to 400 seconds to load a single apex class. In CodeFusion I can monitor exactly what happens: the Metadata retrieval is queued and therefore it will be checked after a threshold again and again until it is finally retrieved. Typically that happens within less than 3 seconds. As far as I know, on force.com IDE (and other IDEs) something very similar happens. Switching between Tooling and Metadata API doesn't change much – if one is slow, the other one is slow either and vice versa.

I know these performance issues from other Sandbox instances (mostly cs17 and cs18 where I struggled into it last year several times). On the other hand I'm working a lot on developer orgs running on production instances (mostly on eu0-eu5 and na9 in my case) where it's nearly always fast or very fast.

The issues last year where sometimes visible on https://trust.salesforce.com/trust/status/ as yellow exclamation mark – but not always.

Now I can't see anything on cs14 – however the issue is still present.

I have several questions:

  • How this transparency page works exactly? Will the entries be generated by an automatic reporting and monitoring mechanism or are they based on customer reports about issues?
    • If so, is there an easy way to report performance issues?
  • How high are the thresholds until performance issues will be reported there?
  • Is there the same quality of service level for sandboxes and for production orgs? Or should I simply expect a somehow lower performance on Sandboxes?
  • How much slower should I consider as too slow? (In my opinion > 200 seconds to retrieve Metadata which typically comes in 3 seconds it too slow)

Also for huge SOQL queries it feels way slower to work on sandboxes than production orgs, however I did not track this detailed in the logs.

  • Is there any documentation on performance differences between sandboxes and production orgs?
  • has anyone of you shared the experience of slow sandboxes?
  • any idea on how to help to get this improved or reflected on trust.salesforce.com?

Best Answer

Also, use the staging environment to perform stress and performance testing. Note that because the hardware for sandbox in the Force.com platform differs from the production organization hardware, the results of performance testing on sandbox might not match those in production. Nonetheless, performance testing on the staging sandbox can still help catch performance issues and errors that arise from Apex governor limits.

Source: https://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/dev_lifecycle/salesforce_development_lifecycle.pdf

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