Loading time too long :/
Hi awesome team!
Okay, it's time for me to point out a painful issue: The loading time on startup. See, I have been fighting eagerly to spread Workflowy around me, and I have won a few battles. After having using it as a shared grocery list with my wife, she has been trying to use it for her own personal projects. There is also this group of friends that were curious enough to accept using it in our role-playing sessions. But here is the catch: All those great people are getting real upset on the startup loading time of the app, despite them having very tiny accounts. And I can't say I blame them. I use the "keep app open" feature on my Android devices so the app is always open to bypass this loading time, and I think it really is an issue as it is right now.
Don't know if you have any plan to tackle this, but I think you should :)
Thanks again for the awesome work!
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I'll put in a vote for this as well. Loading takes ~7 seconds for me on iOS and ~26 seconds on macOS using Chrome. On iOS it's mostly frustrating because it reloads almost every time I switch to a different app and switch back. My day job is software development and I was a software tester in a previous life, so if I can provide more technical details to help debug or improve things I'm happy to help.
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Any updates on this? Any way we could get more details on approaches that are being considered? I've recently deleted tens of thousands of nodes to try to improve performance and it's still not great. More detailed information about the problem and solution space would make me feel a lot better about being able to use WorkFlowy in the long term.
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Agree as well!
I understand it loads all the bullets when starting up. How about loading all the bullets from the top level or two and then load the rest in the background? If a loaded bullet is clicked before everything is loaded, loading the sub-bullets real-time should be pretty quick.
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Yeah, I was thinking of a solution like that, but it does not work, because you need to be able to perform a search or an inline linking or mirroring from anywhere anytime, which only works if you have loaded the whole thing (especially when it comes to inline linking and mirroring).
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I’d like to second this. WorkFlowy is my primary organizational app as a software developer and has been so for years. I have a very large WorkFlowy with an untold number of bullets. Loading on iOS has been slower and slower - typically minutes - but I don’t primarily use it on iOS so I’m willing to wait when I do need it on iOS and do something else while it loads. Problem is - starting recently - it just never completes loading, no matter how long I wait. It’s migrated from being an annoyance to a serious problem. I’d be happy to “flag bullets” as “not available on iOS” - including searching, tags, mirroring, etc - anything to make it possible for me to be able to get back to using the app on iOS. Thanks!
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For me the mobile app is unusable. Ive got a lot of nodes and screenshots, but that was the whole idea behind the app for me: a 2nd brain to store everything.
I currently send myself an email and copy the content to the web version, which is far from cool.I have no clue about software development, but can WorkFlowy keep track of change date of a bullet? That would allow to download only the changed nodes since last load (the other ones are stored locally on the device). I understand it increases database size, but people seem to favor speed.
In case it helps: happy to pay more for it
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The last input from WF was a year ago:
Loading speed is one of the most important things to us... it's just a tricky one to crack. It's the holy grail to us... and we're looking intently into it. In real time
Clearly, this is an issue for several folks. Why isn't WF current in the conversation at least with the status of the "real-time" investigation?
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I gave it a shot a few times but it doesn't seem to be a ton better for me so far. My first load on the iOS app was ~10 seconds. Then I navigated to a deep node because I wanted to know if quitting the app and reopening brought me back to the same node I was at. This time I opened the app and it looked like a page was refreshing about every 20 seconds. After two minutes I gave up on iOS. On MacOS it took ~30 seconds to load the page. I'm not sure how many nodes I have currently compared to my message above from 9 months ago, so maybe a have a bunch more, but things appear to be a bit slower than that test.
Let me know if there's any additional info I can provide. I'd really love to have a smoother experience, and I'm happy to help!
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