There are several factors that cause the form/portal to slow down.
1. Number of Linked Record Fields (most common)
The speed is expected to slow down significantly when a form is loading multiple linked records fields (with child records). Because this data is being fetched from other tables, this will add an extra few seconds for each table.
Linked record fields are related to child forms, which exist as distinct entities. They fetch data from another table, thereby contributing to an extended loading duration for the form or portal. You can draw a parallel by comparing a form featuring multiple linked record fields with one encompassing just a single linked record field, and the distinction in loading time becomes apparent.
2. Number of records
The grid/gallery supports pagination by default. It limits the number of shown records to 100 and allows users to click "more" to load the next page. But if you have a lot of records and/or a lot of images, the performance may become slow. We recommend reducing the number of records by using filters to control the view.
3. Number of fields
You can hide some fields so that only a few fields are shown by default. Users would need to click to expand the record and see the rest of the fields.
4. Image resolution
This is a possible reason why a galley view is slow. If you have very high-resolution images, we recommend resizing these images for them to load faster. You can use one of our extensions to do that.
5. Airtable Limit
The Airtable API normally allows a standard request rate of 5 requests per second. However, if you reach your limit in Airtable, the rate is reduced to 2 requests per second, impacting the speed of extensions.
💡Note
The portal employs caching, which means that the initial loading of records may take longer. However, subsequent access to the records should be faster due to the caching mechanism.