Retool Embed URL takes too long to load, without even embedding it

App Building
1

Morning!

We have been working with some retool embeds and we are having some issues with the loading times (around 5 seconds on average). There was one or two forum threads already on this topic however they were all closed.

My colleague recently reached out to the retool team about this to and we were advised that we should profile the performance of our embeds and the retools themselves to compare them and identify potential bottlenecks or long tasks.

It was additionally mentioned (Pete the Heat replied to us) that having long embed times isn’t supposed to be an issue, therefore I want to outline our findings after these profiling tests and to ask for some further tips/help tackling the issue.

  • We have tested the Retool Embed Urls we receive directly onto the browser, so without embedding and separate from our platform, to test loading times.

    • Loading times remained unchanged compared to when using the URL to embed the retool on our platform when doing so. Therefore we can confidently eliminate the Iframe on our platform which we use to embed the retool as a cause for the performance issues.

  • We also created a retool app for testing performance on, that only contained a text box message (‘hello’) to test for loading times

    • This time the loading time on platform was a lot quicker, and when navigating to this retool using ONLY the Retool Embed Url, the loading time was roughly 1.5 seconds - so fairly quick however given that the retool was practically empty not ideal either.
      This might be indicative however of how our retools’ complexities do actually affect loading times?

  • The performance profiles also show that there is a significant amount of idle time (around a 2-2.5 of seconds) during the loading of the retool. We the we think to have identified as the period where retool code compiles before rendering.

One point we are additionally particularly interested is:

  • There are two ways of embedding retools:
      • One is using retool’s cloud infrastructure, which I believe we are using (retoolEdge? Not very sure about this.)
      • The other is by self hosting the retools.
    • We are based in Germany. Does having to use retool’s cloud infrastructure slow down the embed?
      • Potentially due to it being hosted in a far region and thus accumulating latencies per request ?
      • Would proceeding with self hosting the retools improve performance times?

Any help and insights regarding how to further improve these loading times for the retool embeds would be greatly appreciated. We are looking to leverage this feature to extend our platforms features suite and hence we would like to make the UI as smooth as possible.

If you need any more details regarding our apps please let me know!

Best,
Alexander Armero

2

It is worth mentioning loading times occasionally go up to 8 seconds even.

3

We also experience the same long waiting times when using ReTool Embeds