My App Is Unbearably Slow!

Is there anyway to make the app faster… possibly pay for our own server to host on?!? Seriously this is just unacceptable and embarrassing at this point…

Please tell me any tricks you guys know or how we can fix this because I cannot launch using Adalo if it is seriously going to be this slow!

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experiencing slowness as well - i second the opinion of being able to buy private servers etc. good revenue stream for Adalo :slight_smile:

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How many records do you have? How large would you say your app is, trying to forecast if we might run in to problems as well. Thanks

About 1,000 records but ideally more.

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@seanmodd My app was (and is) having a similar issue, but I have a few things I do to help speed things up a bit.

The practices I’ve found that help:

  • Always make sure “load list as user scrolls” in the Advanced Settings of the list is always selected.
  • Always compress images before you upload them to the record. If it’s a user uploaded image, I don’t know of any way to compress it further (or if there’s any compression done automatically by Adalo).
  • Try to show pages with small amounts of records. Try not to have a page with a list of 1,000 records all trying to load (especially if you don’t have “load list as user scrolls” turned on). See if your app can feasibly allow the user to only get to a huge list of records if they are deliberately looking for a huge list. Otherwise, try to always show filtered lists.
  • Include a search bar. I’ve found that the search bar can search the records really quickly. So including a search bar on a page with a lot of records can allow your user to look for exactly what they need, rather than using resources/time to pull up a lot of records.

Depending on what your app is being used for, there’s probably some other optimization techniques you can use, but these are the ones that I’ve found help me the most.

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@austinkthompson @seanmodd

I posted something about image optimisation which has greatly sped up showing a list of items with images.

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@seanmodd a few things:

  • these are some good suggestions from others but keep in mind there are a number of potential culprits for app slowness (network latency for instance)
  • You can use the Chrome inspector to get a little more insight into things like slow images and what parts of the page are taking long to render. This video below shows you that:
    Loom | Free Screen & Video Recording Software | Loom
  • If you’re willing to post your .json export from that, that would give anyone at Adalo diagnostics to work with from the client side. Only they have visibility right now into performance bottlenecks from what’s going on on the server
  • vote up this feature request as I agree with that suggestion that the option to purchase a dedicated VPS for your app would be huge and potential new revenue stream for Adalo (though I’m sure it would involve a non-trivial amount of architecture rework in order to support that)
  • If they do expose that ability, it would be great to go the extra mile and have the ability for us to bring a New Relic API Key and get granular server-side insights into app performance bottlenecks

good luck

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For me, switching from Chrome to Safari definitely helped!

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Yea but that’s a browser decision on the user’s side. If you’re talking about things you can do as the owner of the application to ensure it performs fast regardless of who is using the app then mandating they use a specific browser to access it isn’t really realistic.

IMO step one is to diagnose the culprit of the slowness first (network, application, database, large images, etc) then work to resolve from there.

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That’s true, thanks for advice :slight_smile:

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