New Bubble dev here, I’m putting together an MVP for a new product that involves displaying items pulled via API call from my Airtable backend. The repeating group where I’m displaying these items is loading extremely slowly. The page itself loads in quickly but the contents of the repeating group take ~7 additional seconds to load in, which is not going to work in a production environment.
I don’t see many people discussing performance issues on relatively basic use cases like this, so I’m hopeful this issue is just a development server one, but I don’t want to assume that and present an unacceptable MVP.
Can anyone advise on this issue from either a free/paid tier standpoint, or if I can expect identical performance on a live site, how do I go about troubleshooting the slowness?
Gotcha. Would you expect that the issue here has to do with the airtable API component (are those usually slow/noninteractive speeds?) or something about the UI choices I made for displaying these items? The quantity of data is pretty small (hundreds of data items, not millions).
I think in the short term I should get this data into bubble’s db and try to figure out if the issue is the Airtable link or something else
I can’t say (my data is in Bubble), but if I had to make a guess I’d say the issue is related to the Airtable connection. If you search the forum for Airtable you’ll see if anyone else has had similar issues.
Unfortunately the data model is already in AirTable and I’m currently trying to replace the front end with Bubble. Back end replacement will come in time, but it does seem that some of the data needs to be moved to Bubble to make the more complex parts of the app performant. Thanks.
Hi @Steve_W ,
Did you test your page with debuger on?
If you run version-test of your page without debuger it should load few times faster. (More like in live mode).
In addition you can try to uncheck “show all items immediately” in your Repeating Group if you have it.
After trying a number of things and experimenting, it seems that it’s impossible to store this data in AT and create something in Bubble on top of it that is responsive enough. I’m working on putting the data model into Bubble, which will be better long term anyway.
A quick note for anyone else who runs across this: There is a service named Sequin (sequin.io) which creates a sql-like proxy layer between you and Airtable for handling just this situation.
Hi @Steve_W , did you end up moving your entire AirTable DB into Bubble’s own backend db?
I am finding myself in the same position and considering whether to replicate the data model and copy all the data across into Bubble to make the app more performant.
It’s hard to give up the advantages of working with the data in Airtable though. I need to do a lot of manual work on my data and Airtable is so good for this.
I’ve explored two-way sync options but either the plugins seem unreliable/expensive or the alternative solution is a bit technical for me.
I only came across Bubble because i was lookingfor a frontend for my AirTables. I spent months working across Bubble and AT.
Months spent just getting things synced and then resynchronizing in Bubble when i had to adjust in AirTable. Troubleshooting was a headache cause I had to check both Bubble and AT. I had to create so much workarounds and scripting (in AT) until eventually I said fuck it to AirTable and did it all in Bubble.
My only regret is that i didn’t migrate to Bubble earlier. AirTable is just not a good backend for Bubble.
I agree with @ihsanzainal84 here. Unfortunately airtable just isn’t a workable backend for another app. On top of everything else, airtables api rate limits (5 requests per second for your account, from all sources) will not scale very far. It didn’t take me that long to decide to move away from AT, but I also wish I had done it sooner.
I moved everything into Bubble and while I also hate bubble’s data storage situation, at least it doesn’t have all the headaches of airtable.
The biggest downside is the lack of visibility/manual data investigation and management. There is nothing like a query builder/data visualization console, or way to apply query-based transforms to your data. Of course, you could spend a ton of time trying to build such a thing, but it would be difficult and non-extensible (related note, I wish that the bubble data types had good reflection methods or the data types could be dynamic where selected. I’d like to write a generic data viewer, but that’s also not easy due to this).
From the beginning, bubble has been a stopgap between where we started and (presumably, if we are successful) an app coded in a more flexible system. For now, I’m living with it, but there’s a lot you might expect to be able to do that is really hard with the way bubble does data.
