Performance differences in free vs paid plans?

App Building
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Hi all,

I couldn't find anything regarding this question, so hopefully you guys can help: Can I expect a performance increase especially when requesting external resources via HTTP APIs when changing from a free to (any) paid plan?

Currently I am facing performance issues to Google Cloud Platform for example. Requests that usually need 2 seconds via postman need 6 seconds in retool. Is that due to a limited amount of resources in the free tier? (would totally make sense, but I am not sure).

Any hints are appreciated. Thank you.

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Hey @myndeu, Alex here from the Retool team :wave:

We do not throttle performance for the free plan, so upgrading to a paid plan isn't going to improve performance. Though, there are a few other potential strategies that you can try:

  1. Set the default outbound region. If you are in Europe you can change your default outbound region from us-west-2 to eu-central-1. This is a new feature that we launched last year, here's the reference in our docs. In short, if you are based in Europe, this this a quick way to reduce the distance of the round trip from your computer, to our servers (the outbound region), to your resource, and back, which can massively improve query performance. This is enabled from the Settings > Advanced page or individually on a per-resource basis.
  2. Try self-hosting Retool. If you colocate Retool in the same VPC as the resources to which you are making requests, that can drastically improve query performance. We do have a free self-hosted plan as well. However, this might be more trouble than it's worth, depending on your comfort/familiarity with Docker.
  3. We do offer some general query performance best practices in our docs; however, I don't think these will help improve the baseline query performance.

In order to debug this further, do you mind sharing a screenshot of the query timing tooltip? This is visible if you hover over the 6.0s text that you should see next to the query name in the Retool editor. I'm curious which step(s) in the query execution are taking the most time.

You can see an example of this tooltip in our docs:

image
image1600×638 142 KB

Also, I would hesitate to compare the same query in Retool (cloud-hosted) to Postman (local). Unfortunately due to us executing the request from our servers, this is not an apples-to-apples comparison.

3 Likes
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Hi alex, thanks a lot for your detailed feedback. I'll follow along and check which tweaks I can apply.

Have a nice week and thanks again,
Cheers, Markus