[Bug]: Poor/slow editing experience after a moderate amount of notes added to slide

[jamievicary]

What happened?

We are using tldraw in my research group to take notes during research meetings. It is an excellent and fully-featured program, thanks to the community who have done such an excellent job putting it together. However we have noticed that once we have been writing on a page for 10 minutes or so, the performance really starts to drop off. We are just writing using the pen tool, not using shapes. It seems that the app becomes unable to capture stylus positions with a sufficiently high frequency, so we have to start writing very slowly. The browser tab memory does not seem to be becoming excessive so I'm not sure what would cause this. Opening a new page solves the problem and writing becomes snappy once again.

It could be that this is a fundamental limitation with the tool. However I don't see how the existence of objects elsewhere on the page should reduce the point capture frequency for new pen marks.

How can we reproduce the bug?

Use the pen tool to write for 5 or 10 minutes on a single page.

What browsers are you seeing the problem on?

Chrome

Contact Details

jamievicary@gmail.com

Code of Conduct

• [X] I agree to follow this project's Code of Conduct

[MitjaBezensek]

The number of elements on the screen can definitely cause slowdowns. Pen shapes have a lot of points to make them look good, which can start weighing down the browser.

Do you use any high resolution images in these documents? Those can also cause slowdowns.

Is there any chance you could send us an example of such a document so that we could investigate? You can go to the menu, File, Save a copy (or press Cmd / Ctrl + s). Can share an email or you can reach out to me on discord.

[calebeby]

I have noticed a similar issue in the past. This document is not particularly large and the problem is not too terrible compared to larger documents I've made in the past (with more handwriting), but it still is noticeably slower to write in it compared to an empty document. I have to write slowly for it to keep up and a lot of the strokes look really bad.

https://www.tldraw.com/r/aeO5aF6JF2V9MNJS371XY?viewport=1516,2895,2712,1541&page=page:OS7K6JByaiADITjPQu0bO

[MitjaBezensek]

Thanks for sharing this! Can you also let us know what kind of a device and browser are you using?

[calebeby]

I've noticed this in Chrome edge and Firefox on a ThinkPad X1 Carbon with a huion graphics tablet as well as on my phone Galaxy s21 ultra

[KySpace]

Same here. This problem has been there since the last major version. Sometimes closing the tab and opening makes it a bit better, and sometimes pen curves just become lines.

I am using a Wacom tablet on Edge. I really hope that the team can have more tests with heavy duty pages. My temporary solution is to open another page, but the infinite canvas should be infinite for a reason, after all.

https://github.com/tldraw/tldraw/assets/23047275/74d82323-1546-4aa5-bd89-5d0fed2d94ec

[jamievicary]

I wonder if there is an update from the dev team on this. Your whiteboard app is the only good one out there -- and this is the only limitation that's preventing massive use from our research group.

[ysulyma]

I'm having the same issue---tried using it during a meeting, and kept having to start new pages. I was hoping to use tldraw for recording lectures, but this won't be possible with the performance issues.

[MitjaBezensek]

Hey! We did a bunch of updates on performance and we just shipped this this week (2 days ago). Is it any better for you now? We improved a bunch of things, but we still have a few more improvements planned.

@KySpace I noticed that you are using the grid. Try turning it off and see if that solves it? We are aware that grid can get slow and have some ideas on how we could improve that.

[KySpace]

@MitjaBezensek Yeah. I can say that it has improved. I'll keep trying with larger files.