How to speed up loading initial page?

App Building
1

Hi,

I noticed that it takes about 3 to 4 seconds before my web page shows anything. In the meantime all I get is a blank page.

Is there a way to say "Loading page..", or even better a way to speed up startup of a retool web page?

Thanks!

2

Hi @PatrickMast,

There are several factors that can lead to this behavior. Most importantly are CPU and network speeds. It would be useful to know what kind of computer you're using (year and cpu model) and the speed (bandwidth / latency) of your network.

To make sure we're talking about the same thing, let's focus on the "Time to first contentful paint", which is a metric that measures how long until the browser renders an element on the page. This metric can be measured exactly by using the Lighthouse tool in Google Chrome dev tools. Are you able to try running the Lighthouse tool on your end?

For comparison, a 2020 MacbookPro (high-end) takes 1.1 seconds and a 2023 chromebook (low-end) takes about 1.6 seconds. These are measured on a 100Mbps Internet link using an empty app hosted on Retool cloud.

Other factors at play include:

  • If you are using Retool cloud, or Retool onprem.
  • [If using Retool cloud] where you are physically located, if you are closer to one of our data centers / CDNs you will have lower latency.
  • Other programs running on your machine, including extensions running in your browser.
  • Whether your browser is correctly caching JS/CSS assets (normally this is true, but sometimes browsers allow you to disable caching, or if you do a "hard refresh")

Regardless of your exact situation, we are working to improve this metric for all of our customers by optimizing our initial JS/CSS loading. Assuming no confounding factors, 3-4 seconds is definitely not acceptable!

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