Hi everyone,
My name is TJ Andrews, senior engineering manager on Bubble’s Platform team.
We’ve been working behind the scenes to make your apps faster and more reliable, especially when dealing with large amounts of data.
Today, I want to share some improvements we’ve made to how Bubble handles database operations that should make a noticeable difference in app performance for anyone who was experiencing lag in database searches, insertions, and deletions.
What we improved
Over the past few weeks, we’ve fixed inefficiencies and cleaned up and standardized other aspects of the indexing process on our side. As a result:
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Database indexes are now created automatically during off-peak hours.
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We removed a limitation that prevented indexes from being automatically created on(and thus speeding up) tables with more than 5 million records.
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When you delete something that’s referenced by other tables, Bubble has to look up those references before completing the deletion. We’ve optimized those reference deletion lookups so they’re up to 90% faster.
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Database searches are up to 50% faster. In technical terms: P99 latency went from 105ms to 58ms, P999 from 832ms to 475ms, with fewer slow queries and timeouts, preventing cascading performance issues where slow queries affect the entire system.
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We are using HypoPG to test indexes before creating them, ensuring they will actually improve performance.
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We set up weekly removal of unused indexes — we’ve already cleaned up 860k+ indexes (over 1TB of data).
How these updates help your apps
All Bubble app developers benefit from these improvements. They’re especially helpful for:
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Apps with large datasets (index creation was previously limited at 5 million records)
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Apps experiencing slow queries, timeouts, or performance degradation as they scale
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Dedicated app customers who previously required manual platform team intervention (improvements rolling out in the coming weeks)
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Any developer building data-intensive applications that need reliable performance
How the feature fits into our roadmap
These improvements make every Bubble app faster and more reliable. They help Bubble scale as your apps grow, and by handling performance automatically, we can focus on building the features you want.
How to access the new feature
These improvements are already live for all Bubble apps on our main environment. The improvements run automatically during off-peak hours.
For those of you on dedicated environments, we’re rolling this out in the coming weeks.
This is part of our ongoing effort to make sure Bubble scales with your ideas, no matter how big they get. We’ll continue investing in infrastructure improvements that make your apps faster and more reliable.
As always, if you have questions or notice any issues, don’t hesitate to reach out on the forum.
— TJ and the Platform team
