Curious one here. We’re showing periods where we’ve hit max capacity and we have the page freezing and even our editor freezing when searching for data, but we’re at less than 10% of our capacity usage. Has anyone else ever experienced this?
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Thank you for sharing, we also had a similar issue, reported to Bubble
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The interesting thing is that we had 10 users on our site when this happened.
Would love to hear what comes back @wegetdesign - I’ve been reporting stall-outs and page freezes and skipped workflows to Bubble on our app for nearly a month and have yet to get a sound explanation for why this is happening or what we can all do to stop it.
I gave up a while ago reporting this, I would get times where it hits Max capacity and then other times on the same process not a blip. Never got a sound explanation other than good to see it has gone away, well it came back and then went away and came back but couldn’t be bothered reporting it again.
Bubble’s official answer to this one, just in case @stevenM or anyone else is following along was (to paraphrase):
“You had a large spike in capacity usage that wasn’t caused by page traffic (15 users), workflow runs (lower than usual) or page views (average) and didn’t show up in a minute-by-minute chart of your capacity usage despite the fact that for almost all of one of those minutes, your app was actually at 100% of max capacity instead of the 10% showing on your charts. We either don’t know or won’t tell you what caused that, so good luck fixing it.”
So either (i) our app magically started using a TON of capacity without any increase in workflows and only 15 people viewing our page or (ii) our allocated capacity dropped massively for a short period of time.
Does anyone know how capacity is allocated between apps on Bubble’s shared servers? Is it fixed month-to-month? Do apps on the shared server have fixed capacity levels? Or can those change as temporarily based on other factors?
In every other app and project that I’ve ever been involved in outside of Bubble, these spikes in usage are really easy to diagnose on the server/hosting side. Here, Bubble itself can see them but shares almost no information around what happened.
The pitch here has always been that you don’t need to be a developer to build your app on Bubble. Well, I’m not. And I did build my app on Bubble. And then the second we actually start to grow, we’re hitting the same issues many apps start to hit around growth but we’re working with a black box because we (i) can’t access our logs reliably and (ii) don’t have visibility into what’s actually causing spikes in capacity usage on our app. Pretty tough to diagnose the issue, fix it and continue to scale when you’re not getting the information you need to do so.
@brian I have asked many times been involved in many discussion over the last 3 + years on this and I still don’t know the answer to your questions. So good luck finding out!
Hey @Jenn - this issue has stopped for us, but unfortunately has been replaced by another one that has now taken Bubble Support over a month to address. Unfortunately we’re really struggling to run our business on Bubble with only 2-3,000 users on our site a day.
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Just out of curiosity, what plan are you on ? Are you using the “boost” (concept that i find kinda childish if I wanted to run a business on bubble) ?
We’re on the Team plan, but we’ve also added 16 units of extra capacity, which we pay $320 a month extra for.
3000 users isnt that much?
i have to agree, 500 + 320 dol / month to struggle with just 3K users sounds like a playground platform, not business grade. I get the business model of not paying devs, but servers are cheap this days.
Is you app intensive on some way ? or just CRUD and front end ?
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Agreed, this is tough to swallow. Also very curious about your apps spectrum though.
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The app itself isn’t overly complex, but there are quite a few workflows attached to each primary action. But to be clear, our issue at the moment isn’t related to capacity. It’s related to the idea that in using a platform like Bubble, you’re outsourcing a part of your tech stack. When you have issues in the part you outsource (in our current case, cookie management and user account access), you can’t really tell your clients to just hold on for a month while Bubble tries to sort it out.
And I agree - as Bubble evolves and gets better in a lot of ways, so do the alternatives and we as a scaling business are evaluating a number of different paths forward. We’ve accepted that we need to rebuild our app to continue to grow and have spoken to a few Bubble agencies alongside teams working in other stacks. And while we know an experienced Bubble agency can improve the speed and efficiency of our app meaningfully, where we struggle is knowing that until we’re self hosted in another stack we’ll continue to be subject to some of the inherent drawbacks of working with Bubble.
It’s honestly a tough call. There’s a lot to like here and for validation I’d recommend Bubble in a heartbeat, but we’ve really struggled in trying to get our clients the performance they need from us (and answers when things fail) as we’ve grown.
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No worries @Jennn - hoping your Wappler project goes well too. IMO, Bubble & Wappler are two totally different platforms aimed at different user bases at very different stages of their development. As an example, have a look at
Creating a popup video player from a video grid shouldn’t require 50 steps and doesn’t in Bubble. There are benefits to the simplicity of Bubble, but also drawbacks as well. Wappler looks like an interesting tool for people with quite a bit more coding knowledge and the interesting comparison would be a traditional MERN/MEAN team vs. a Wappler team with regard to value of build (cost/time/quality tradeoff).
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That would seem out of character for the Bubble team and the community. From what I’ve seen they’ve always fostered a healthy dialog on different platforms and I’m not sure why they wouldn’t here as well unless you’re just bombarding the boards with “Bubble can’t compete” comments.
And while I’m sure there’s some overlap in the base of people who would be interested in both platforms, no code is very different than low code for people who don’t know any code. “Drag, drop, size and connect to workflows visually” is a different experience to “use visual elements in your layout, then copy and paste code where it should be”. The former always works fine for people with very limited coding knowledge while the latter only works if you either know enough code to know where to cut and paste or you have step by step instructions for every single element you want to build.
I know I personally took one look at Wappler and knew (i) I couldn’t have built our app in it myself and (ii) I’d have to find a freelancer or agency who specialized in it if I wanted to use it in our rebuild.
For us, it hasn’t just been about ease of use either. It’s been about speed in validating assumptions, iterating quickly and finding out what our clients really wanted us to build. Once we did that, we started growing at 20-40% per month pretty consistently and when we did that, two things happened: (i) we started running into scale issues on Bubble and (ii) some of the largest early-round SaaS VC’s in the world started asking us for meetings.
That’s why I say I always recommend Bubble for validation. Testing ideas and iterating quickly here is easy for a non-technical founder like me and if that process goes well for people then finding the resources they’ll need to address sustainability and infrastructure in a rebuild won’t be a problem.
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This is scary stuff to hear after investing 6months learning and building own platform on Bubble.
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Totally agree with your posts. Just frustrating to hear these kind of stories. I really hope Bubble listens to this (@emmanuel). I would hate to be in the same position as you in the future. I think it’s a shame Bubble has so many performance issues. It’s a shame that the cost isn’t at the level it should be in relation to the users and performance it can support.
Bubble, stop building features and trying to get bigger, solve performance issues, its much more important, or it will kill your business. I’ve seen it so many times in the past…
Regards
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I am still in the building stage so I have no first-hand knowledge of scale issues.
I’ve read posts by Bubble’s founders and staff that improving speed/scalability and reliability are top priorities. From a business perspective, this would a critical priority, since it allows Bubble to keep larger customers longer.
The capital raise gave Bubble the resources (engineers) to improve these areas. I recall reading in posts (I think from Josh) that they had tackled a lot of the easy speed fixes, and now were into heavier stuff. I imagine that doing major work on the platform has and will create bugs until it’s done.
I’ve noticed that technically skilled builders (who have the knowledge to use low code tools) fall into two camps. Camp #1 is annoyed that Bubble doesn’t have the speed and functionality of low code options. Camp #2 recognizes this, but also recognizes that developing on Bubble is very fast, and so it’s useful for building and iterating.
Then there are the non-technical users, including those that need to spend time on business building, rather than on learning programming. I’m in this category, and so Bubble has been a good fit so far.
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