A faster, smoother Coda
We built Coda to be flexible, so that any team can express its unique perspective and create its ideal workflows. Along that journey, we’ve seen teams start with simple docs that grow over time. Other teams start by building powerful apps with advanced building blocks like complex formulas, automation and data from other apps.
We understand that managing complexity is essential for teams to build powerful docs that fit their needs and workflows. But this complexity shouldn’t come at the cost of slow docs or unresponsive tooling. That’s why our aim is to ensure Coda remains smooth and responsive, whether your doc is a single line of text or helps conduct your team’s entire workflow.
Today, we’re announcing a wide range of improvements we’ve made in recent months that make docs smoother and faster. If you’ve wondered why your docs have been feeling much smoother lately, we’ll take you behind the scenes to highlight some of the improvements we’ve made.
Behind the scenes
Over the years, we’ve made countless optimizations to ensure Coda runs smoothly, even with complex docs. However, as our makers built ever more unique and bigger docs, they uncovered a new set of performance issues.
To understand their issues, we spent dozens of hours talking to makers who use Coda to manage large teams or run advanced workflows. From our incredible community of makers, we learned about the different actions that teams rely on to get critical work done. Based on this feedback, we developed a set of guiding principles to determine which improvements to prioritize first:
- Preserve the flow: Performance issues are most painful when users are in the middle of getting something done, so we decided to prioritize improving interactions that interrupt users when they are in their flow.
- Breadth over depth: Rather than going deep on optimizing scenarios affecting specific customers, we prioritized improvements that would make docs and calculations run faster in general. Specific scenarios were helpful inputs but we used them to understand themes.
- Tools, not rules: Instead of expecting makers to follow some rules to prevent their doc from getting slow, we gave them tools to see which formulas slowed down their docs and learn how to fix those issues themselves.
Smoother browsing
Makers that use Coda to run their teams often have docs that can slow down when switching quickly between many sections or browsing through large tables. Now, makers may notice smoother browsing thanks to a few of the following changes:
Scroll smoothly through sections of any size
In the past, a large table with 1,000 rows and 20 columns would scroll at around 2 frames per second and the scroll would regularly stutter. You can now smoothly scroll any table at over 50 frames per second with no stuttering, regardless of the number of rows.
Grouped tables perform dramatically better
Tables with groups used to perform poorly and sometimes freeze the UI. Now, all grouped tables scroll smoothly at over 50 frames per second, regardless of size. Moreover, unlike in the past, tables now continue to perform smoothly regardless of the number groups they have.
Search inside your doc 5x faster
Users told us that searching in a big doc was painfully slow and sometimes unusable. We’ve made huge improvements to in-doc search so searching for the same string in a large doc is now 5x faster on average.
Switch between large sections instantaneously
In the past, switching to a large section with several grouped tables and charts could take up to 10 seconds. Switching sections is now instant for almost all sections, regardless of their size.
Faster editing
We’ve also made significant improvements to common interactions while editing docs as well as all calculations in general.
Add rows up to 4x faster
It’s important to us that Coda feels fast when adding data. With that in mind, we made a series of improvements that made adding new rows in big tables up to 4x faster. For example, in a large maker doc with many complex formulas, adding a row went from taking almost 15 seconds to under 4 seconds.
Other calculations run up to 3x faster
We’ve made major improvements to how we store things in memory, allowing calculations in most docs to run significantly faster. When making changes in a large doc containing a table with 2,000 rows and several smaller tables, all calculations complete 3x faster than they did before the improvements.
Modify & delete rows in lookup tables dramatically faster
When a row was modified in a lookup table, we used to recalculate all formulas that referenced that table. We’ve now improved the algorithm to only recalculate items that reference that row. In a large maker doc with tasks mapped to projects, modifying or deleting a task went from taking several minutes to just a few seconds.
Tools for even faster docs
When we talked to makers experiencing performance issues, sometimes we discovered that just a couple formulas slowed down their entire doc.
In these cases, we’d use our internal tools to help makers figure out which formulas took the longest to calculate in their doc. Drawing on our knowledge of the calculation engine, we then helped them change the formulas that were slowing down their doc.
As we repeated this process, we found something surprising. In many slow docs, small changes to a few formulas would often make a bigger difference than we could have with months of performance improvements. For example, some users using the Now() formula could easily switch to the Today() formula, which only recalculates once a day rather than every second. The simple change would significantly, and immediately, improve the performance of the doc.
In addition to shipping improvements to overall performance, we also wanted to help makers find and fix issues like these in their own docs. We built a set of enabling tools to help makers further optimize their specific docs. Since then, we’ve seen many examples where makers used these tools make their docs significantly faster, in just a few minutes.
Overall, docs are performing smoother and faster, and makers from our biggest teams say they have saved hours each week. It’s been encouraging to hear makers notice these changes, sometimes the day we roll them out. And far fewer makers are reaching out for help with slow docs or feature requests for performance. That said, we know performance work is never done, and we’re hard at work on the next set of improvements.
Until then, enjoy the smoother, faster Coda and stay tuned for more!
