Very often, we come across systems where loading times and response times for actions are frustratingly long, making the use of our ERP system far from efficient. In this article, we’ll explain how to recognize if your system is slower than normal and needs attention, what common issues you may be facing, and what you can do to alleviate the situation.
Is my Odoo slower than it should be?
To answer that, we first need to understand what kind of operations Odoo is performing. It's normal to experience longer load times when generating reports with large volumes of data or when running actions that involve creating or modifying many records. You should also monitor how many users are accessing the system simultaneously, as a high number of concurrent users can overload the system if it's not properly configured. However, if you're seeing consistent delays even in simple tasks that take more than a couple of seconds, or complex operations that take several minutes, it may be time to intervene and check whether everything is set up correctly.
Analyzing my system: What makes Odoo slow?
Some of the most common issues we encounter when analyzing Odoo performance include:
- Many users accessing the system at once.
- Problems with the server host: frequent micro-outages, poor performance, etc.
- Misconfigured server hosting the Odoo instance.
- Custom development with inefficient code.
- Poorly optimized database queries in custom modules.
- Execution of heavy processes like scheduled actions or reports involving large datasets, which create bottlenecks.
- Very outdated Odoo version. Older versions may have performance or reliability issues and receive less community and security support.
- A very large database with massive amounts of stored data.
How to improve Odoo performance
Once you've analyzed the possible causes and identified the critical pain points, here’s what you can do:
- If there are too many concurrent users, consider scaling up the server, decoupling the application from the database, or implementing load balancing between two servers.
- If the machine is simply underperforming, check whether a restart solves the issue, if the servers are down, or get in touch with your hosting provider.
- If system monitoring shows that resources are being exceeded, increase them according to current and expected needs. Odoo provides recommendations regarding how much RAM and how many workers your system should have based on concurrent users and running LiveChat instances.
- If you detect inefficient code — repetitive, redundant, or poorly structured — it should be refactored to implement a more optimal solution. Also, review database queries to ensure they are necessary and only retrieve the minimum data required for the operation.
- If the database is very large, consider archiving historical data not frequently accessed or adding indexes to critical tables.
- For scheduled actions or reports involving large amounts of data, consider refactoring these functions to make them as lightweight and fast as possible. You can also parallelize tasks by breaking them down into smaller ones and executing them progressively using the OCA’s Queue Jobs module. We’ll cover this community tool in more detail in future posts.
- Finally, if you’re running a very old version of Odoo (generally more than 2–3 versions behind the current one), consider migrating to a newer release to benefit from performance improvements and new features.
At Dixmit, we understand the frustration caused by slow Odoo response times and we’re committed to helping businesses facing these issues. You should also know that Odoo provides technical guidelines for configuring an instance, as well as hardware recommendations based on key parameters — all available in the official documentation. Additionally, the Spanish Odoo Association’s YouTube channel features informative videos on performance monitoring and optimization.