I see that there is a trending theory about Cloudfront, and I have to agree with that, I’ve seen that recently and I do wonder if that is causing these issues.
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I am wondering if it is as well and perhaps this issue is already known.
In the monthly update from May it was stated
We’re in the process of rolling out a connection pooling layer in front of our main cluster databases. This is big infrastructure change (and was the source of a couple of our more recent outages), but it’s critical to let us keep scaling up our systems. Right now, one of our big performance bottlenecks is that we’re unable to add as many servers to the main cluster as we’d like because of pooling limits, which leads to slower response times throughout the system. This infrastructure change, once complete, will unlock that, which is a major victory in making Bubble faster and more scalable.
So maybe something is going on to get this sorted.
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same it started yesterday. I thought it started because I allowed auto binding (I know silly cause)
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I think it’s worth noting that the issues I had last night were on a paid plan, legacy professional. This is has been one of the primary factors to me posting. I would like to know if I am still vulnerable to increased load from other apps using a shared pool when on professional. I have optimised the app greatly as well, it’s 4 pages using the BDK service.
I have a decent structured database (have been bubbling for 2 years and involved in tech for 15, I know php and some light node.js) and I had some “unknown pressure” causing degradation of the app. It was back to normal when I checked the following morning. As I said though, I fully expect this with the incredible piece of kit the bubble team have created. Just putting this down so that it may help with insight.
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Speed is highly variable for me. Sometimes it’s lightning fast, sometimes it’s really slow. Often it depends on what time it is. Someone, in some other speed thread posited that it could be slower at night because of increased load when people run API workflows?
I do, however, see speed differences randomly during day time as well. I would load a page in a flash and five minutes later the load speed has tripled. I try to check my connection when that happens and most of the time I can’t see anything unusual. BUT over the last few months with a high amount of people working from home, internet has been spotty in general. Especially in a city area with hundreds of units in the same building on the same ISP.
I’ve been trying to figure out how to read and make use of the capacity graphs, but I’m lost, they seem like gibberish to me haha. I can’t even figure out if they’re reading from the live site or offline, or both. A tutorial on this from @Keith or some other clever bubbler would be fantastic.
Or perhaps even a bubble blog post detailing it? “How to make use - and sense - of the capacity graphs” there you go, a title for you 
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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).
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Hmm, sorry about that. I think it may just be your app, or creating them under specific situations; I think creating them is working for most of our users (I just tried a second ago and it worked for me). If you haven’t already, mind opening up a bug report with details on which app you’re having this problem with, what you’re trying to name the reusable element, and whether you’re trying to clone an existing one or create a brand new one, so that we can investigate?
(And if you’ve created a bug report already, and you haven’t heard back from us for over 5 days, please send me a PM with the bug report # – we’re making an active effort to get back to bug reports more quickly, so if yours slipped through the cracks I want to double-check).
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Thanks for the explanation. That definitely makes sense for me that the page load is slower after editing, as I am only building at this point and not testing anything live.
Would there be any benefit in creating a workflow that is meant to open all of our apps pages after we deploy to live?
For example, if I have a blog with 100 articles, all are accessed with the same page but use the blog articles ID as a path to load the particular articles content.
Would there be any benefit to creating a workflow event for navigation to an external website set up to open each blog article? In the sense of subsequent page loads being faster, if we get the first few page loads completed that way?
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A quick update from my side on this… My page loads were still way too slow even after some use. So I made the big step of setting up Cloudflare this weekend. Very noticeable improvement in page load speed and dhtiece is no longer visible. Moving between pages is close to instant except for one very heavy duty page.
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I have also tried to contact support about page speed, but the recommendations were always pretty useless. For example, they told me I had to solve an issue, and it took a couple of tries and a few months till they finally posted it as a bug, till today although the bug is supposedly fixed I still get error messages.
I’ve been a bubble user for probably 4 years now, and an avid recommender of bubble. However, the lack of ability to get real support on it, seems like it’s better to brush away the speed issues. It’s become so bad the page load speed that our sales agents have it in their sales scripts to apologise.
I have the business plan on Cloudflare, but almost nothing works, as the cache and CDN is using an external entity meaning we cannot control it unless we write extensive Cloudflare rules.
Certain plugin loading we had to stop them via Cloudflare workers, and we are actively trying to build Cloudflare workers to combat the 20+ second load speed as we lose customers transitioning.
We started at a 40 second load time a while back, today we reached 20 seconds on a simple signup page which we have mainly converted to custom HTML to try and combat the slowness but that did not work.
Issues with Bubble:
- They have a language section but the whole language files are populated increase the page size.
- Many fonts are loaded which are necessary, I have no idea where in our software we use these fonts if they are used at all, I must have gone through the styles 3 or 4 times.
- The Time to the first byte is 3 seconds, on our Unbounce pages it’s invisible and loads instantly.
- Plugins load unnecessarily, but clocking them with Cloudflare has worked.
- The cleanup tool has strange recommendations, things like unused Language or Multiple fonts etc could be there to help users.
- Plugins seem to kill performance also even the first byte but I cannot understand why.
I like the idea of bubble and used to believe a lot in it, but as the performance got worse, the recommendations for speed were, let’s be honest, a joke. I’ve stopped using bubble for a lot of things. I tried other no-code tools and the speed of them vs bubble for the same page with same needs was unfathomable.
I hope this slowly starts to be a wakeup call to bubble, they are growing, lot’s of people including myself who I personally brought a good 40 people to bubble are/were recommending but speed is critical, we cannot have the first 7 seconds of bubble loading up it’s JS files…
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What is the BDK service you referenced? I would like to explore that for my app.
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Was a few hundred dollars but crushes general native app build cost. https://www.thebdk.com/native
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hey bro! How did you achieve this? Its a significant improvement!
Hey @juan.roberto.garzon,
I believe that test was on @josh’s test site (https://test-hobby-987.bubbleapps.io/version-test/simple_page).
That’s right! Well, that page with a single box is displaying very fast, no doubt.
Ok, so from this discussion, and from my beginner point of view, I can conclude that to speed up my app, its best to:
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Use “Do a search for…” instead of “Current user…”
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Try to reduce the number of elements on the page
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Use a minimum number of plugins and delete unused ones
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Set up Cloudflare
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Upgrade to a paid plan
Please add to it if there are more ways to improve the speed of our apps. And even tho the forum work just fine, It would be very useful to have some sort of manual or doc with best practices for optimizing app performance.
Thanks to all of you for sharing your knowledge.
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Hi @mark1 I agree with you. It was very exciting to think about the idea of building an app on bubble, however, the issue of load times and performance makes it less appealing. What other no-code tools have you tried? it would worth exploring other options that could perform better on the long run if bubble keeps having this inconveniences.
Thanks in advance man
Hmm is this true? I thought it would be the opposite.
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Also, a reference I commonly use is by AirDev https://docs.airdev.co/canvas/using-bubble/bubble-best-practices/speed. Maybe this can help in this conversation?
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