Average Form Generation Speed

The average 5 page form should take 3 to 8 seconds to render, depending on the user’s browser, their internet connection speed and the payload size of the form. Since every form package is different, load times will vary. Other user-level factors, such as the user’s anti-virus system, can cause forms to load slower too.

Improving Performance

The best way to assess whether changing something will improve speeds is to measure the time it takes for Quik! to accept a request and return a response, and to separately measure the time it takes to render a form in the browser once the response is received by your system. Since form load times vary by form request, it’s better to measure performance with the same form package(s) each time.

The time it takes to generate forms can be influenced by several factors:

• Number and size of forms – the more forms in your package, the longer it takes to generate and render forms. Requesting fewer and shorter forms will be faster than longer ones. Try to avoid grouping households together in a form package.
• Number of fields on forms – the more fields displayed on forms, the longer it takes to generate and render forms. Longer forms, like insurance forms, can have more fields and take longer to generate.
• HTML 4.0 Support – Turning off HTML 4 support (set the Quik! property HTML4Compatible to FALSE) will speed up form generation and result in a smaller HTML file size, which improves load time.
• Custom CSS – Our default CSS is optimized for our viewer; any customizations to the CSS could impact form loading speed.
• Request Payload – The bigger the request payload size is to generate a form, the longer our process can take. This includes number of fields being prefilled, custom javascripts, custom CSS, field rules (instead, manage field rules in the Quik! Forms Enterprise Manager), logo URL (instead, use the Quik! Enterprise Manager). Payload may not have a large impact on speed so it’s worth testing payload size with the minimum payload vs. normal payload to see if the speed improves.
• JavaScript Hosting – By default, all JavaScripts required by the Quik! Form Viewer are hosted at quikforms.com. It may be possible to gain some marginal speed improvement by hosting JavaScripts yourself which can be configured in our API.
• Upgrade – Using our latest Quik! Forms Engine API may be faster. Since the majority of customers are on the latest version, our systems are naturally optimized for the higher-use versions. This is not to suggest that we have done anything to hinder, slow down or punish older API usage, rather, some components of our architecture are prioritized in cached memory when they’re used more – this is an inherent effect of our database system and may be inherent in other components of our architecture.