Troubleshooting Slow Navigation (7-10s) Between Retool Apps

💬 App Building
1

Hi Retool Community,

We are seeking some advice and best practices for troubleshooting a significant performance issue one of our users is experiencing. Our Retool solution is quite large and has been modularized into several separate Retool applications. The primary issue is a long loading time, sometimes up to 10 seconds, when navigating from one app to another.

The Problem

  1. When a user clicks a component (e.g., a button) configured with the "Open another Retool page" event handler, they experience a loading time of approximately 7-10 seconds before the destination app becomes interactive.

    We've used Chrome DevTools to investigate, and for the affected user, we are seeing a Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) of around 7.7 seconds when loading a page that is essentially a large table view.

    What We've Investigated So Far

    We have compared the experience of two users, one user (who has the slow performance) and another (who has much better performance), to try and isolate the variable.

    1. Hardware & OS: The hardware is nearly identical and should not be a bottleneck. Both users are on modern, high-performance laptops.

    • Processor: 12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-1255U

    • RAM: 16.0 GB

    • Graphics: Intel(R) Iris(R) Xe Graphics

    • OS: Windows 11

    2. Browser & Local Environment:

    • The issue persists for both users in both Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge.

    Our Questions for the Community:

    1. When navigating between two separate Retool apps, what exactly is happening under the hood? Does the entire Retool editor/framework, user authentication state, and all libraries have to be re-initialized from scratch, or is there a more optimized hand-off?

    2. How sensitive is Retool's app-loading performance to network latency vs. bandwidth? Are there specific network metrics we should be measuring (e.g., Time to First Byte, ping)?

    3. Are there established best practices for optimizing performance in a multi-app Retool architecture? For example, are there ways to "preload" parts of the next app or reduce the initial query load?

    4. Beyond the standard Performance tab in Chrome DevTools, are there any Retool-specific debugging tools or techniques we can use to pinpoint exactly what is taking up the most time during this app-to-app transition?

    Thank you in advance!

2

I’m at 14.6 s to LCP in our core published app, so you’re doing well!

In all seriousness, I just wanted to chime in that this isn’t a “you” problem. Our experience with Retool’s backend is the same as yours, even after completely rearchitecting the app to break out pages and reduce dependence on transformers. It’s pretty demoralizing, to be honest.