We’re experiencing a worsening, critical performance degradation across all our Softr applications connected to Airtable that began approximately 1-2 weeks ago. The general complaint from our operations and our customers is slowness, timeouts. Portals are “painful to use”
Has anyone else experienced similar issues recently?
Symptoms:
Consistent slowness. 10-30 seconds to load pages.
Page load times can be in excess of 2+ minutes
Frequent but intermittent timeouts when fetching Airtable records
Even Softr UI elements are failing to load (intermittent white screens)
Issues affecting both data loading and general page rendering
Scope:
Affecting ALL our clients (100% of our portfolio)
Occurs even with our smallest client (~2,000 total Airtable records)
Using Softr’s new portal architecture
Leveraging optimized Airtable views to minimize record fetching
We are considering a wholesale change away from airtable, but that’s not an insignificant effort to undertake.
Thanks for your report. Generally, we haven’t heard this or seen this behavior across our product in the last couple of weeks. That means we’d need to get access to your app so we can see what’s going on.
I will say that our team is in the final stages of upgrading the airtable datasource connection to our latest data model, and if you’ve had isolated events of this degraded performance happening, it might be due to occasional migrates behind the scenes. But if it’s been a consistent problem the past two weeks, then please contact our support team so our engineers can review your app.
Otherwise, you should actually begin to see significant performance improvements with airtable in the coming weeks as we finish this migration.
Yes, I share the same experience. It’s definitely slower than it used to be. Before I would describe it as being snappy, but now it’s actually slow. I see the circling circle for far too long every day.
I’m having the same issue. I’m close to actually launching and am hesitant that I’ll need to explain to new users that they have to keep refreshing the page until it loads. Not a way to launch a new product.
I did reach out to support and this was their response:
”I am writing to inform you that our tech team checked your app and found out that the feature, which should refresh the browser, has not been added to the apps for the Airtable datasource yet. However, by the end of November, we are going to update Airtable connections with Softr (we call it Airtable V2). After that update, this feature should be added to the apps automatically.”
Which I understand, tech updates take time. So does anyone have a short term fix for this or am I stuck waiting until December to launch??
Sorry for the delay in performance you’re experiencing here. It’s been really hard for us to track down the root of this as we’ve had random, intermittent, complaints about it, but when we go to check the app, we’re finding the performance is restored. However, i wanted to let you all know that we are aware of it, and are working on making it more stable every day.
To answer your question, @Audra , no I don’t think you’ll need to wait that long. I’m expecting to have Airtable V2 available much sooner than the timeline you listed. In the meantime, you could explore adding a browser refresh to specific button clicks using a little bit of code. If that’s something you want to explore while waiting for Airtable V2, let me know and I’ll try to get someone to help with that!
Audra, one thing we found, with the help of the Softr team, is that we were still using OAUTH connection to Airtable. They helped walk us through switching over to a PAT connection, and everything has been massively improved ever since. Note, we have also focused on using our airtable views to make sure we are only retrieving records we NEED for any dynamic block.
Nice. Great idea. Is PAT just using the API keys for Airtable? If so, I am already doing that. If not, love more info. And will go back and visit views to see if I can clean that up a bit. Appreciate it!
That would be amazing, thanks. This has been a massive project and just hate to launch with… please refresh your browser and wait for the content to show up.. lol
My Airtable based app is performing markedly faster now. Especially, the pull up of the Edit Item Action forms on list blocks and saving updated values.
Can you please provide an update to improving the Airtable connection.
I have multiple issues in my app, from charts not updating with new data, sometimes even a page reload would not solve, a log in and log out does fix it but not a solution for users. Also user groups that I rely on as I work a lot with visibility across the entire product from buttons to certain blocks etc. I have already spoken to support but it seems like it is a slow API issue.
Are you in the process of fixing this and when can we expect a realistic timing for that? The data always shows up in the end and user groups will update but this needs to happen immediately as the data is written into the database as the UX will break and users these days do not accept excuses. They want it to work. Thanks for your hard work behind the scenes.
With our Airtable datasource being updated, I believe the problems listed in this thread will either go away or be reduced significantly. And with no new comments in the last 3 weeks, I’d say that it seems to be working. We will continue to monitor and improve though.
Not a way to launch a new product.
. Apps and studio down. Not Airtable’s fault this time 
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