Why Many Glide Apps Slow Down

Community Resources
1

Why Many Glide Apps Slow Down
I have noticed a pattern in many Glide apps I build and help scale. They start fast, but as data grows, performance begins to slow. Users notice immediately. What once felt smooth can suddenly feel sluggish, and engagement drops.

1768296312779
17682963127791280×853 171 KB

The Real Cause of Slowness
From my experience, the problem is rarely the amount of data. The real factor is where your data lives and how it is structured. Choosing the right data source can make the difference between an app that feels slow and one that feels instant, even with thousands of users.

Insights from Glide
Glide recently shared insights that confirm what I have seen firsthand. They explain why some data sources handle growth better than others, how to structure tables for speed, and why small adjustments can dramatically improve performance.

Why It Matters
If you are building apps that need to scale, this is an area worth paying attention to. The right data setup affects user experience, retention, and the overall success of your app.

Here is the full breakdown from Glide: https://www.glideapps.com/blog/glide-data-sources-speed

4 Likes
2

Useful read, Gideon. Well done :flexed_biceps:

1 Like
3

Thank you :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

4

Thanks Gideon.

Glide was originally a Google spreadsheet data source and a Ui on top.

We were then able to add excel and then other data sources. Glide tables came after that. Slow apps were never a feature back then. This messaging was never front and centre:

Every time your app has to fetch data from outside Glide, wait, then send changes back, you add friction. Users feel that friction as lag, delayed collaboration, and the annoying moment where someone says, “I changed it, why do you not see it yet?”

Sure relative to a glide table that has no sync logically excel is slower because of the round trip.

All no-code tools generally say any issues with integrations they offer are that fault of the third-party, eg Microsoft or Shopify (which may be true but if you’re selling me a product with the ability to integrate maybe make sure the integration doesn’t have any issues first, just like a store selling me a flawed product it resells. Search the community for Excel sync issues for example).

Given Glide positions itself as connecting to your existing data, app slowness isn’t really highlighted as a known feature the way it is in this article.

IMG_3801
IMG_38012732×1174 163 KB

No slowness warnings here. If you are going to turn a sheet into an app your sheet is probably big enough to not justify starting from scratch in a Glide table. Which according to your article likely puts you into slow sync territory from the start :smiling_face_with_tear: Intelligent but slow apps.

Adding the 100th row will be faster than adding the 10,000th row I guess is the takeaway because deltas aren’t synced, the whole datasource is. Right?

Something that I’ve assumed by never seen documented is that Glide must create a cached copy of your data on their server and that is what syncs back to Excel or whichever source you use. It’s not literally displaying your data directly.

Maybe the ideal set up is using an automation that adds a row from your sheet to a Glide table via API that seems to work almost instantly and is the delta data not a full data source sync.

Thanks again for your insights.

1 Like
5

I randomly saw this copy from an older version of Glide’s marketing site:

Glide makes it easy & fun for anyone to create apps without code. Pick a Google Sheet and Glide assembles a polished, data-driven app that you can customize, share as a PWA, and publish to the App Store and Google Play if you desire.

Again, no warnings about slow sync in sight.

6

I’m not sure at all, but this is maybe how we could visualize things. 1st attempt:

Displaying data
App (client side) ⇄ Data stored by Glide server side (Glide Tables or Big Tables) ⇄ Data stored by a 3rd party (Excel, Airtable)

Data is not stored client side.

So if you want data to display as quickly as possible, it’s probably best to store data in Glide Tables or Big Tables. This is no to say that Excel or Airtable are slow, but perhaps slower (at times noticeably, at others not) than Glide’s native tables.

Computing data

  • In app (client side), if data stored in Glide Table
  • In app (client side), if data stored Excel or Airtable (speadsheet databases)
  • By Glide (server side), if data stored Glide Big Table
  • By 3rd party, if data stored in other high-scale sources

So one would store data needed in the app in different places based on requirements for that data: scale (amount of data), compute (processing the data). I think it’s a balancing act between speed of display, ability to compute (servers can compute faster and more than an end device), convenience (what tool does the developer know, is there existing history with a 3rd-party tool).

I’ll let the computer engineers in the forum chime in.

7

I think there is relative slowness and absolute slowness.

If Excel and Airtable are options but sync is slow (or with Excel often problematic) this is absolute slowness.

Excel and Airtable are also slower than Glide tables. This is relative slowness.

Both are slow, just in different ways depending on the comparison.

2 Likes