Keeping Figma Fast: perf-testing the WASM editor

Post by wryanzimmerman » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 12:11 PM UTC

fswd wrote: post #44

MBCook wrote: post #42

I have the displeasure of using Figma at my job. I have a very low opinion of anything that locks up my browser for multiple seconds (Chrome or Safari) whenever I open it in a tab. Then it takes a few seconds to load the file, which I don’t care much about. But locking my entire browser is inexcusable. It’s nice they’re working on performance once you get going, but launch performance is abysmal for me (x86-64 Mac).

Requiring figma at a job should be a human rights violation :). I'm off the grid and whenever I use figma it drains my batteries with a high CPU load. I have to be careful to open it during the dead winter, if I leave it open I could drain my entire 5kw setup. If I throttle my CPU, it's totally unusable. Hopefully I can get a more efficent setup (currently an old 2400GE minipc). Usually I take a screen snapshot becau…

Post by KaiMagnus » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 12:52 PM UTC

mortenjorck wrote: post #35

chrisdbanks wrote: post #31

Is Figma fast? I see huge lag on loading files. Sometimes images don't load for 10+ seconds after the file opens. Based in EU we often don't get thought about in testing.

The answer to "is x fast?" is always "compared to what?" Having been a long-time user of Figma's somewhat-trailing (at this point) competitor, Sketch, speed is surprisingly one of Figma's most immediately-apparent advantages despite being web-based rather than MacOS-native. At a previous job, we had a Sketch file that contained more or less an entire B2B app, and at hundreds of megabytes, it took tens of seconds to l…

Post by lopkeny12ko » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 1:18 PM UTC

wryanzimmerman wrote: post #81

fswd wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Requiring figma at a job should be a human rights violation :). I'm off the grid and whenever I use figma it drains my batteries with a high CPU load. I have to be careful to open it during the dead winter, if I leave it open I could drain my entire 5kw setup. If I throttle my CPU, it's totally unusable. Hopefully I can get a more efficent setup (currently an old 2400GE minipc). Usually I take a screen snapshot becau…

You should get a mac laptop, you can run figma all day without even needing to plug in the laptop to charge.

Post by sanitycheck » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 1:40 PM UTC

bsder wrote: post #9

drewda wrote: post #4

Occasionally I wonder what could have happened to front-end web application development over the past few years if Figma had open-sourced their WebGL-based GUI library. We've had ~15 years of focus on the DOM with the progression of jQuery to Backbone to Vue, and many other libraries. At least what I've heard of the Figma approach almost sounds like the Adobe Flash/Flex runtime. That might only make sense for applica…

Figma was considered ... good? Every time I have used it, it feels incredibly laggy with a crapton of useless animations. Maybe it's better on Windows?

Post by MBCook » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 4:00 PM UTC

fulafel wrote: post #74

capableweb wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’ve seen this happen, but I don’t understand why that is possible. Chrome tabs are separate process, how can one tab freeze the whole browser even when running the worst code in existence? Because if anything takes up 100% of CPU, other things starts being unresponsive as there is not enough CPU to go around. Happens easily when dealing with concurrency and parallism, which I'm guessing Figma happily uses.

This is not the case. Maybe people have already forgotten what using computers was like when everyone had only 1 core, but having a few desktop apps pegging their share of cpu doesn't hurt interactivity much even on single-core computers.