A fair and honest chat about Performance

Wasn’t even that much actually, I now have a team of coders - payroll is the cost.
I can give you a quote for turning your bubble app into real code - maybe I’ll start a side hustle around that :face_with_hand_over_mouth:

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Oh good! So at least USD $20,000.00/month in the US then! Thanks for sharing!
I think it’s funny how you say “real code” :joy: like Bubble is surreal code or something like that.
I understand what you mean with it, just think it funny.

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I am fairly happy with bubble speed in my use cases.
Can’t say how it would handle 300k users simultaneously because my apps are not in this situation.
If you don’t have this problem, I really don’t see any reason to change from bubble to a bunch of developers.
In my opinion, the best thing about bubble is the ability to deploy new features quick and easy. And INDEPENDENTLY.
If you deliver value in your app, a few miliseconds really won’t mean anything.

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Hello, new user here. I came to Bubble in hopes of building a custom work-management tool. After using Airtable for our work-management for several years, we became frustrated with it because Airtable keeps refusing to add several crucial features (link to other bases, advanced permissions, etc).

Then we went to Coda, and it actually has almost all the features that we lacked in Airtable (minus uploading attachments into a record, but that’s another story). However, after investing hundreds of hours building our own app in Coda, we found out it became unusable with even a small number of records. Performance was very slow, and it was not scalable at all. It’s also not a priority for them at the moment (they’re focusing on design and UI improvements among others).

Which is why I came to Bubble. Now the first thing I actually did after playing around in a bit, is see how scalable this is. It’s disheartening to see that performance will become an issue here as well. Hence, I’m not going to repeat what I did with Coda. I won’t spend months on this product, only to find it become unusable, again. So sadly, I won’t be using Bubble

PS: wanted to mention that I’m not looking to make a very complex work-management process. Just a simple task list with a customized workflow, which also links to my small team’s attendance and HR info. I realize that there may be apps built for this, and I’ve searched a lot but none of them fit our needs fully so far, which is why I’ve tried to make a custom one in Airtable. I also realize that it’s not an easy task, if it were that easy to make project management apps, everyone
would’ve done so. So maybe Bubble isn’t meant for this, but seeing how close Airtable got (their performance for my use case is perfect, but it lacks customized user permissions, automations and buttons), I wish Coda/Bubble were doing it.

Hi JarvisDigital

Thanks for sharing your insight.

Just for my understanding, and hopefully useful to others in this forum too, could you please share some light on what “tests” you ran and felt that “bubble subsequently failed on”, in order to come to the following conclusion:

It’s disheartening to see that performance will become an issue

Many thanks, and wish you all the best in your application!

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@allenyang, I just finished reading the book on JAMstack (written by its creators). From what I can tell, this design approach may be the next best way of making apps. Between the experience of my developer friends and various case studies
LobLaw:

  • 9.4x Faster To Interactive
  • 92% Better performance
  • 38k monthly cost savings

Smashing Magazine:

“The time to first load is so much faster than before… before we had to wait for the HTML file being served for 800ms and now it’s 80ms .” (more here)

and the fact that:

more than 8 percent of the internet population visits a [*JAMstack] site each month

this looks like the future of web development. Perhaps JAMstack itself isn’t the future but the central tenant of improving performance by pre-rendering HTML (meanwhile getting any CRUD operations done via APIs) is .

I know that Bubble already uses React on the front end.
You guys have also separated the concerns of the front end from the back end.
From the little I know about your tech stack, it seems like it has the essential structures in place for pre-rendering HTML like JAMstack would. Is this something you guys are experimenting with (I imagine the answer is yes)? Can you tell us the results of those tests? Or are performance issues mainly from other areas of the application?

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I’m confused, the forums said this is your first post. Do you have other accounts that you have used to get help, and tips to optimize your app? If not, I’m pretty sure the design is likely the issue. If you have lots of searches and awkward groups, that would cause slowness. Additionally you didn’t actually say what any of your issues are.

You only spent a couple hundred hours on another app design platform, so now you won’t spend much time here, but then come on the forum and suggest you really know the performance of the platform? I would suggest people should not throw stones in glass houses that they aren’t familiar with.

Now if you want to show us your editor, confirm plan type (for speed and capacity), and tell us the issues you are having, then a meaningful conversation can be had. If this isn’t done, I would strongly suggest this post be taken with a grain of salt.

While it sounds like I’m bashing you, I’m really just trying to ensure everyone has the most optimal time possible. If you would like the community to ensure that the performance is the issue, please show us your project so we can help you. Also keep in mind that the free plan is in itself slower, so if you are on that, it will be half the battle.

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I just put up a post on the performance issue. Wondering about other people’s recent experiences.

Are you still on bubble?

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As I said, I recommend building ideas and if you see traction then build it outside bubble.
Yes, I’m still using bubble to build non-complex apps and ideas to validate or reject.

Please note, back in the day we didn’t have plugins that can provide some performance improvements like algolia etc…

There are some apps that can work on bubble and some that can’t. It seems to me that the performance issues all arise from Data Calls, if you are using private data that has privacy set they will load fast, so building a closed SAAS platform for management of a business can have much better performance than building a social media type app whereby you want users to access a feed that has million+ data in it. That will load slow.

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I purposefully created a new account to write this post as I’m trying to remain in “incognito mode” as I prefer privacy. Anyhow, once your app gets traction you’ll ask these questions yourself, hopefully you’ll be able to make a decision that’s right for your business. Because at the end of the day, we are building businesses here, not just apps…

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Totally agreed, I still have apps on bubble that don’t receive this kind of traffic and it’s fun to build and add new features in a snap with bubble.

But now imagine that one day to next you have 10k new users/day signing up, you’d be happy at first but what do you do next? This is what happened to me.

It might be that you didn’t use the best building practices and you will be so slow all these new users won’t be able to use your app at all.

All I’m trying to say is that it’s important to not only build your app, but once you see that it’s a viable business, you need to think about what’s next.

I can see much improvements of bubble since my post was made but there are still operations that are hard to scale when your app goes viral.

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Curios if you tried implementing Algolia search with bubble before moving on?

If so, how much had it helped?

Cool! Will keep this in mind for future reference. Thanks

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I have my concern about Performance too. But my friend.

You need to see it from a Bigger Picture. Not JUST THE APP itself.

  • How fast u can develop a viable MVP or even a small/medium Scale Apps.
  • I am a veteran business developer ( not coder )
    • so I have bigger perspective when talking about App Dev as a Business
    • Sometime the biggest problem was, we invested to much on a Unproven Idea.
    • Bubble.io for me, become the best “Performance” Tools , for following reason :
      • Lowest Cost ( Time, Money, HR Spent )
      • Fastest Development ( User friendliness, + a helpful community )
      • Still Scalable MVP

Honestly, once your idea works, you have lesser worry to getting the right tools/team to even re-establish a new foundation.

  • My Last Advice. People who think their plan will not failed. Failed most.
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But, @vlad, is it not true that if you reduce the returning records significantly before the advanced filter, that the performance will be negligible? For example, if there are 10,000 rows in the Thing, and your main query or privacy rule returns 3 rows, and then the advanced filter is added, that it will only work on the 3 rows? Or am I just being hopeful how Bubble uses this feature?

High all, Bubble team is working on an infrastructure change for pre-rendering app HTML. As I explained in this earlier post, pre-rendering HTML (a cornerstone of performant JAMstack websites), will greatly speed up the time to load our pages.

Details came from @josh in his June 2022 community update:

  • We are nearing launch for the next phase of work for generating HTML and CSS upfront instead of on the fly. This will be an intermediary release that will still involve on-the-fly generation of the HTML, but will lead to significant performance improvements and pave the way for future work.

Given the pace of development, it may still be another year or two before most of our pages are pre-rendered but when that happens, critics wont really be able to say Bubble is slow. The future is looking exciting!

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Really - 1-2 years away?? :grimacing:

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Seams a long time… in 2 years what is fast today will be slow

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Lol, yeah 1 to 2 years is still quite some time but static sites (that is to say pre-rendered sites) have long been the fastest loading approach to content delivery so I think it’s fair to anticipate that anything else that can be done to the page itself isn’t really going to give us much more of a speed up in the future. So any new tech for doing that would likely have more to do with CDN improvements/edge delivery networking… Something that Bubble likely wouldn’t build but would instead merely integrate as they’ve (more) expeditiously done with cloudflare.

Genuinely, this will be progress. Just like with smartphone cameras, at some point “better” isn’t even noticeable when every phone already takes beautiful pictures and every bubble app will be sufficiently fast given reasonable page designs.