Has bubble page load speed become too slow recently?

[boston85719]

I have noticed that page load speed on my app in development has become incredibly slow recently.

Just about a month ago, I would see my page begin loading almost immediately. Over the past few weeks I’ve noticed that there is about 4-5 seconds of a waiting period for other pages to load before my page is loaded.

I tested my apps page speed and got really poor results. The diagnostic report indicated there is about 5.5 seconds of ‘stuff’ getting loaded that could be optimized. All of that ‘stuff’ has nothing to do with my app as far as I know and seems to be just associated with connecting into bubble to render the page.

I really don’t know so much about this stuff to speak with an authority on the issue. For me it is just personal observation of a slower page load speed and a simple test that shows it is slow and has a lot of opportunity to improve.

In this idea of my lack of understanding I decided to do a test app. The page has a single shape element on it.

These are the results I got back.

These are results are very similar to what I got back for my app that is loading elements, data and images.

It seems like all the Opportunities are in bubble’s court. The ‘eliminate render-blocking resources’, ‘multiple page redirects’ and ‘server response time’ don’t seem to be something that I as the developer has any ability to change with the way I optimize my page, especially since these test results are for a page with a single shape on it.

1. Has anybody with more experience seen a considerable drop in their page load speed?

2. Could this page load speed performance be due to my being on a personal plan that has only the base amount of capacity? This test app is on hobby plan.

3. Would this performance improve with capacity boosts? And if so, how much capacity is needed to reduce all of these bottlenecks? I’d really like to only have to worry about optimizing my apps pages to improve the page load speed.

For example, this page with only a single shape on it, I’d like to know how much it costs a month to make the page load speed be in the 90-100 range.

For anybody else interested in testing this page and seeing if they get better results, this is the link to the preview mode

https://testpageloadspeedslooowww.bubbleapps.io/version-test?debug_mode=true
https://bubble.io/page?name=index&id=testpageloadspeedslooowww&tab=tabs-6&subtab=General

I used google tool ‘pagespeed’ to analyze

I am wondering how much of the recent changes that bubble has undertaken to fix some outstanding issues have caused what seems like a decrease in performance. I really don’t have any metrics from the past to compare, just personal observation.

@josh would any of the issues discussed in this thread be related to what seems like a decrease in page load speed?

Monthly Community Update -- May 2020

Hi all, We’ve decided to start doing a monthly update for the Bubble community. The goal is to give the community some more insight into what’s going on at Bubble: what we’ve been working on and what’s on our minds. Emmanuel and I haven’t been as present on the forum as we were in the earlier days; as we’ve grown the team and community (we just crossed the 400,000 signups mark!), our time has gotten spread pretty thin. It’s been great to see the rest of the Bubble team pick up the slack, but …

[dan8]

This is a constant issue for apps being developed on Bubble. From what I have read, it’s partly to do with how bubble builds the app on load. My understanding is it’s a JS file that does most the heavy lifting.

I recently created an app that is 4 pages. It does little searching but has quite a few elements on each page. The JS file for this app is around 1.6mb - You can start to see a picture now on page speed and performance. I think out the box, it’s around 600-800kb. On a fast internet connection, you’ll be waiting on response.

The second aspect is performance which denotes how the apps are loaded. I have seen this vary throughout the day. I’m GMT (U.K. based) and the app loads quite quickly throughout the day (before the US are up). In the evenings (and particularly last night) I experienced issues regarding loading. I have the luxury of being the only app user for this given app. The performance and loading degraded due to “something”. One thing I noticed was a slow aws loading for a small mp4 file.

From what I believe, there is “pool” of resource which denotes bubble app loading and performance. On hobby it is shared. Not sure on higher tiers but possibly shared from a smaller pool? Dedicated is obviously own pool. With an increase in apps contending for this pool and user count going up, I suspect this will lead to loading issues at higher pressure times. Again, this is only information I have picked up from monitoring the forums as some may be close to the truth, some might be misinformation or outdated.

What I will close out on with is Bubble is f**kin amazing. The toolset it provides for no code is unmatched and currently, speed and loading is going to be an unfortunate trade off. If I were bubble (and I’m sure they already are), I’d be throwing an overkill amount of resource to make sure there is ample computing power and well positioned serving clusters. Scale up this infrastructure and get performance for serious application builders flying. I can wait for prettier interfaces.

[SerPounce]

I’ve also started to experience unbearably slow load times.

[boston85719]

Do you see this little gem in your bottom left of the browser window?

For me this seems to be the culprit…takes about 3-5 seconds every time.

[SerPounce]

You got it.

Same story for me. Can go longer than 5 secs at times.

[SerPounce]

I’ve also had this happen a few times today on routines that work perfectly, and then on occasion I’ll get this nasty fella:

I’ve also been getting this one on log in. The user can just click through it, but it’s terribly annoying. Happens about 50% of the time. I logged a bug report for this one:

[boston85719]

Yeah that dhtiece… is new to me…never saw it before about a month ago or so. Or it was loading quickly and was unnoticeable.

[Liam]

Imo, Bubble has always been slow unless you’re paying them hundreds a month… or have zero items in your database.

[boston85719]

It might not have been lightening fast, but I had never seen such a considerable lag in page load. What I am experiencing now is slow. I am basically trying to find an explanation of how the increase in capacity, and therefore operating costs, will improve the page load speed.

I understand the more I pay the faster it should be, but on a test app with a single shape that has such a low page load speed score, and long overall time to load, using that as a base, what would it cost to get page load speed to near zero.

[SerPounce]

And now I have this nonsense going on. Bubble throwing the full assortment of rubbish at me today.

[SerPounce]

There are times when I am shocked at how quick Bubble responds. Not often, but it does happen. I just hope that the updates being eluded to in other threads will happen soon enough and fix these problems.

[Liam]

There’s no answer for that mythical question. Nobody but Bubble knows what a unit is or how it improves performance!

[csblack]

Yup. I have an app with a simple signup form that just took 15 seconds to load.

[jcalvarezjr]

I’ve noticed this as well, just to load our /signup page performance is unbearable.

[w.fly]

Indeed - I’ve noticed the “waiting for cloudfront” as well more frequently.

However, I’ve been using Bubble for years - Unfortunately I’ve become accustomed to 3-4, even 5 second load times for non-cached pages. It’s usually the first thing my clients notice - “Hey it’s taking quite a while for this page to load”.

SPA’s are encouraged to combat this - But I find the extra hassle in the editor is too much (hiding and unhiding groups, all of the elements on the page that slow down the editor unless you turn off issues, and just the sheer amount of interaction on one page)… And SPA’s add even more time to a page load.

Not quite sure there’s much Bubble can do - As others have rightly pointed out, it’s the way this engine works. Major upsides to the engine - However, a downside of course is longer page loads.

Edit: There was a showcase recently and the first thing people noticed was how fast it was loading on page load. The response was that Bubble can be fast if it’s done right. Unfortunately for me building larger scale apps w/ multiple data types and fairly heavy database usage, I don’t know what “right” is, even after 3 years. However, I’ve saved so much money using Bubble vs. our in-house team that I’m still a happy camper!

[nocodeventure]

I noticed repeating groups taking about 3-4 seconds for the past few weeks.

I’m not surprised about the speed as its a free plan. My paid plans are all comfortably fast.

What does surprise me, is the communication towards us on how or when it will be addressed or at least if they noticed the issue.

Recognizing the issue is 90% of the solution.

ps: creating reusable elements still doesn’t work. Critical thing, reported a few times but haven’t had a response yet.

Bubble is an amazing product and I’m still a supporter but please fix the communication towards the community @Bubble

[boston85719]

@w.fly

The response was that Bubble can be fast if it’s done right

I am more curious about which pricing plan is the point that building right gets the benefits. I’m testing a page with just one shape on it and still get these results. It is on a hobby plan, so understandable that it is slower than what a paid plan would be.

My hope is to get some light shed on something along the lines of ‘having the professional plan will remove all the lag time associated with multiple page redirects and render blocking resources’.

I just don’t have much of a sense of how else to improve page speed based on the opportunities listed in the page speed test results except for moving into a higher tier plan.

[johnny]

I’m using a professional plan and it’s got at least a 3 second page load. It’s not HORRIBLE but it’s pretty bad, wished it was a bit faster. Tried to accelerate my domain with Cloudflare, that worked a little bit, but not much.

[boston85719]

@nocodeventure

My paid plans are all comfortably fast

Are the paid plans on just a personal plan with no added capacity?

When you do diagnostic for page speed do issues like ‘render block resources’ and ‘multiple page redirects’ show to be faster than what is seen in the screen shots?

Mostly I am looking at this now for a sense of what things would cost to get page load speed to be fast enough that google would find it acceptable and help with ranking.

[johnny]

@boston85719

Are the paid plans on just a personal plan with no added capacity?

That is correct, the personal plan doesn’t allow you to add additional capacity