Hey guys,
I don’t know if this is what you’ve been seeing, but we’ve made some changes recently that might lead to slower page loads immediately after an app is edited (in development, whenever your change something; in live version, when you deploy), in exchange for overall better performance. The “Waiting for dhtiece9044ep.cloudfront.net…” message generally means we’re rebuilding a page. Anyway, an easy test of whether or not that’s going on is to refresh the page and see if it loads that slowly the second or third time.
We generally put most of our optimization work into making subsequent page loads fast, rather than the very first load after an edit, because once your app starts taking off and getting usage, 99% of the time, your users are going to be visiting a pre-built page. It’s much harder to make that initial load fast than it is to make subsequent loads fast, and for apps that have a lot of usage it doesn’t matter as much, so it tends not to be where we put our effort. That said, when you’re developing an app or are the only user of it, you’re much more likely to see the slower rebuild times. I know that can be annoying, and we have speeding that up on our list as well, but most of the projects to speed that part up are longer-term.
In terms of overall benchmarks, even on the hobby plan, a simple page should load pretty instantly if we’ve already built the page and you’re on a decent internet connection. If you want to benchmark your app, here’s a very simple test page on a hobby plan app you can try loading for comparison: https://test-hobby-987.bubbleapps.io/version-test/simple_page
If you have a page that simple that routinely takes 4 - 5 seconds to load, even after refreshing the page a few times, there might be something more going on. If you see that, please open a bug report with us and share your page (and maybe link to this post to give our team context).
Also, as a heads up, we have some projects in the works that should be increasing performance across the board; we’re probably a few weeks to a month out from completing them but there should be some nice improvements, especially around how much capacity it takes to do things. It won’t speed up performance in all situations, but it should help a lot of common problems, especially where capacity is the bottleneck.
Finally, if you’re not using CloudFlare yet, I strongly recommend setting it up. It’s free if you have a custom domain with us, and while it won’t solve all performance problems, in our testing, it almost universally makes things faster (we’ve never seen a situation where it made things worse).