Bad performance, stuttering while scrolling, repeatedly sync even when Iām doing nothing.
I get the same result on InPrivate window without any extensions enabled.
Environment
Which operating system are you using? Win 10 latest version.
Which browser are you using? Chromium Edge 85.0.564.70
Are you using any third-party scripts for Dynalist, e.g. PowerPack? No
I also have Edge Chromium with the same version as yours and didnāt notice the same behavior. To me Dynalist runs pretty fine on this browser as well as in any other. I donāt have any sluggish performance or the repeatedly sync issue.
The only difference is that my Win 10 is not exactly in the latest version, mine is Release 1909. Yours must be 2004 or something.
Have you tried to reset entirely your browser to the default settings? It might help.
I was kinda wrong. Whenever I open Dynalist in browser, it syncs repeatedly for about 2 minutes then stops. And it happens in all browsers, not just in Edge. I just didnāt notice it until now because things ran well otherwise in Chrome and Firefox. I wonder if this lenghty initial sync is a bug or intended behavior.
The performance is the real problem in Edge. Scrolling a document with 1000+ lines is like 10 times slower compared to Firefox and Chrome. Tried again after resetting everything to default but no luck.
This behavior of syncing during the initial start is pretty normal, to me. As I could see, the loading time is proportional to the size of your Dynalist data. The more you have, the more time it will have to load everything. I usually check when itās done by going in the Settings page and looking at the Inbox definition - When the sync is complete, the āYour inbox destination is document xxxā will populate accordingly. I think my list takes less than 1 minute for the initial sync and I have more than 2 MB of data, when I export all my data to ZIP. You said your data takes about 2 minutes to load and thatās a lot, so I assume your list is huge.
Anyway, I also have a list with more than 1000 items. Actually with 6000+ and it loads pretty fast. However, I always view it with most of the sub-items collapsed and, from my experience with Dynalist for more than 2 years using it, it totally makes the difference in performance.
One good test for you may be to open the Dynalist Live Demo at the Main Page and open the document named āPropaediaā. It will open it fully expanded and youāll see the browser struggling a lot. With every browser I tested, there was a bit of lag when opening this list. When it gets loaded and cached, the scrolling is just normal, even with it fully expanded. Now, try collapsing everything on that and compare the loading time. Unfortunately a page refresh will revert the list to its default view (fully opened), if Iām not mistaken.
I wish some database optimization could be implemented on this process but Iām not sure if it would require a refactor of the whole systemā¦
To give an example about this, I need to mention another service that a few years back did it (I switched from them to DL and never regretted):
Maybe this approach has been already implemented in Dynalist; I have no idea. But the last time I checked and used the other service, they had a very nice smooth scrolling as the lists load on demand, only when you scroll them up or down. They called it āLarge Projects Optimizationā.
I wish Dynalist could think about doing the sameā¦ This way, we could simply leave all items expanded and never worry anymore about performance issuesā¦
We do have something similar in place where items out of view arenāt loaded initially, but instead is loaded as you scroll to it, and progressively loaded in the background. The problem right now is that the rendering engine doesnāt seem to do well when those elements just exists - we have to completely remove them (which only happens when you collapse & zoom).
Iām surprised that Edge vs Chrome has such a big performance difference though given theyāre both on chromiumā¦
We might do another optimization pass sometimes later.
