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Service Portal: How to handle performance degradation in a Knowledge Category containing large number of articles - Support and Troubleshooting
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KB0639109

Service Portal: How to handle performance degradation in a Knowledge Category containing large number of articles


1855 Views Last updated : May 21, 2025 public Copy Permalink
KB Summary by Now Assist

Issue

Performance degradation occurs in a Knowledge Category that contains a large number of articles.

 

Cause

In Service Portal, performance degradation can occur when a knowledge category contains a large number of articles in the kb_category page. This occurs because this page loads all the articles at once, not on demand, and there is no way out of the box (OOB) to control this behavior. Here are some ways to work around it.

Problem Ticket PRB1194786 has already been raised to load the articles on demand.

Resolution

Solution 1: Limit the number of articles

Limiting the number articles loaded on to the page, during testing 250 articles load on to the page in less than a second. Follow these steps:

  1. Navigate to Service Portal > Widgets 
  2. Search for KB Category Page widget. This is the widget that loads the articles. 
  3. Clone the widget 
  4. Modify the piece of code in the newly cloned widget: 
    • Server Script Modify line number 14 from
      data.items = $sp.getKBCategoryArticleSummaries(data.category, 0, 250); 
      To 
      data.items = $sp.getKBCategoryArticleSummaries(data.category, 250, 250); 
    • Explanation 
      getKBCategoryArticleSummaries(<category sys_id>, <article limit>, <char count for description>) 
  5. Add it back to the page using widget instance 
  6. Navigate to https://yourinstance.service-now.com/sp_instance.do?sys_id=b6f5c370d7000200a9ad1e173e24d498 
  7. In the widget tab widget field, change KB Category Page to Cloned Widget 

Solution 2: Using Knowledge Management Service Portal 

Knowledge Management Service Portal is a newly available plugin to work around some of the drawbacks with stock Service Portal like support for multiple knowledge bases. This plugin introduces a new search page kb_search, which loads articles on demand and could apply different filters to it. 

https://docs.servicenow.com/csh?topicname=knowledge-management-service-portal.html&version=latest


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