I am fine with formulas being calculating for a few minutes, but the biggest user experience I have with coda is the entire thing is slow. Opening coda is slow, browsing folders is slow, opening a document is slow, opening a page is slow. It makes me still use alternatives first, before having to move to coda.
I know performance improvements have been a focus, however can we get tracking towards the clear goal of instant document browsing and opening? As quick as Apple Notes for instance.
Completely fine if tables and formulas show spinners, but it is quite a difference when the whole interface is delayed.
I am a user in Sydney with 100mbps down and 40mbps up connection. Perhaps moving more of the backend stack to Cloudflare Workers can help the performance, as that way calculations happen and cache on the edge across all their datacentres.
I am also happy to participate in as many user testing and screenshares with your dev team, as I believe in coda, and want to see it succeed.
Yes please! It feels like forever until a doc opens. Switching pages and browsing is also just barely OK. I am looking forward to seeing improvements in this area!
It’s important to understand here that all that “the Coda backend stack” basically does is serving you a whole doc file. When it’s loaded in its entirety, all calculations happen on frontend.
(I’m oversimplifying it. Of course there are server-side workers for automation and cross-doc, server-side edits caused by API calls, and event messaging for reporting back edits, propagating them to all collaborators, and including those into doc snapshots. But none of these are relevant to the way the doc initially loads for you)
Thanks for the great feedback! We’re investing heavily in improving performance right now, and understand how important this is.
We announced a few improvements for loading docs in November, but that was only a start – we’ve been busy since and are looking forward to rolling out and sharing more updates soon. And we’re planning continued significant investments in performance in the upcoming year.
(One of the changes mentioned in that post was moving document content to CDNs so they’ll load from a location closer to you)
Great to hear you are working on the performance issues.
I am still in the process of moving over from Notion and noticed, that in a regular page with just text I cannot even use the arrow keys on auto-repeat (keeping it pressed) to move through the text. It just cannot keep up with it and after some delay the insertion point just jumps to somewhere on the page. Now this is really an absolut basic requirement. In Notion there’s no delay in the editor whatsoever.
Coda has lots of great features but it often feels like the “boring” basic features are just lacking.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Coda and what it can do. Just please do not forget the basics that one usually takes for granted.
An additional note: The editor is only very slow and has even delays when writing (which break my writing flow) in my large Coda doc. In a new one its OK.
