This is part rant and part education for you all.
I have been on the bubble platform for 5 years now and have a dedicated server and also many community applications.
I have delved deep into the timings and stats of backend calls and validated my findings with support.
- they are not batching enough of their calls from the client and many are sequential when they could be parallel. Without batching, we are at the mercy of number of browser connections.
- CloudFlare is masking a huge issue which if fixed would improve performance by 5x. The connection from Bubble to CloudFlare (cloudflare to you is cached) is not caching the SSL connection (validated by support), so EVERY SINGLE CALL is adding 100-150 MS. Mgets, bulk_watch and search should be 50/70 ms and are > 150ms every single time. This issue + #1 makes for a very slow application. The fix is very easy for them do, and 2 years ago i just gave up fighting with them to get it done. crazy.
- in addition they hadnât enabled gzip compression from the bubble servers last i checked, which is also masked by cloudflare but not as big an issue.
The question here is why not fix it? Bubble?