Performance Q&A guide

[dserber]

These are really good, practical questions! @josh offered helpful guidance on some of your questions in a different forum post. In light of his guidance, we converted several “cross-reference” architecture to “Search for”. Here’s what Josh said:

One-to-many-to-many-to-many performance

Let’s be nice, please If A has a list of B, whenever you load A, you load all the ids of Bs in that list. We may change this eventually but no short-term plans to do this. We don’t actually load the rest of the data for the Bs unless you actually reference a property on the Bs. (I think! If you can build a simple test page that demonstrates otherwise, submit it as a bug) If you’re expecting to have a list > 100 items, I always recommend establishing the relationship in the other dire…

If I understand correctly, “Search for” queries happen server side with Bubble providing some behind-the-scenes indexing optimizations before they are downloaded to the browser whereas “cross-reference” queries must be all completely downloaded to the browser client-side. That’s why Josh recommends larger databases (>100 items) use “Search for”.