Keeping Figma Fast: perf-testing the WASM editor

Evan Wallace (former CTO) was a WASM pioneer IMO, he has plenty of excellent explorations and works shared on GitHub. I don&#x27;t know Evan, but I&#x27;ve greatly appreciated stumbling into his works when exploring SharedArrayBuffer and what was once bleeding edge browser performance.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;evanw">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;evanw</a>

That&#x27;s kind of wild to me to see an app like Figma that&#x27;s a commercial success, but also a demonstration of technical excellency. My brain automatically assumes that you can&#x27;t pick both commercial success and technical excellency at the same time and must compromise on the latter to build more features. But maybe there is hope and users actually love the benefits of a better tech stack (performance, consistency, stability) and maybe it&#x27;s easier to build features with an excellent technical foundation.

Really awesome work! If the authors happen to drop by, I&#x27;d be curious if some of the work in their pipeline might be able to help for other types of GUI applications with Wasm. I&#x27;m also very curious to see what role, if any the Wasm engine&#x27;s performance plays in the overall story, and be able to distill out any key workloads that can help Wasm engines improve.

Seeing a 20% margin of error for some of their tests (due to VMs, noisy neighbors), makes me curious how others solve this problem. Dedicated hardware seems like a good investment, otherwise you need to constantly overcompensate with multiple runs.

Is Figma fast? I see huge lag on loading files. Sometimes images don&#x27;t load for 10+ seconds after the file opens. Based in EU we often don&#x27;t get thought about in testing.

I want to write only: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;penpot.app&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;penpot.app&#x2F;</a>

Figma is anything but fast. Whenever I need to open a file it takes a minute to load on my half a gigabit connection. It&#x27;s strange how much people are willing to put up with slow software nowadays.

Like many other commenters, I found this article surprising. Figma is anything but fast for me. Do you performance-test your software on any Linux distributions?<p>Figjam on Firefox on Ubuntu is <i>painfully</i> slow and laggy. On a 32-core Ryzen machine, drawing lines on an empty file visibly lags. Doing the same thing in Excalidraw, on the other hand, is extremely responsive.

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.<p>Then it takes a few seconds to load the file, which I don’t care much about.<p>But locking my entire browser is inexcusable.<p>It’s nice they’re working on performance once you get going, but launch performance is abysmal for me (x86-64 Mac).

I used Figma recently on a decent laptop. I used it both in-browser and within its desktop app. it was anything but fast. lightning speed compared to Android studio, but slow compared to anything else

Nice post. Figma&#x27;s engineering blog looks great; right up there with Airbnb&#x27;s and Etsy&#x27;s which I also enjoy.

We didn&#x27;t have a problem with Figma&#x27;s technology, but we did have problems with their UI. For example, it confused &quot;teams&quot; and &quot;projects,&quot; making managing your work and granting access to people a baffling pain in the ass. It took a week of E-mailing people for me to gain the necessary access to my own team&#x27;s files when we adopted Figma, most likely because of the inept segregation and presentation of these entities.<p>Has there been any UI overhaul since acquisition?

&gt; We recently developed stress test scenarios for rendering complex scenes—like thousands of layers edited by 50 multiplayer users—and took a very deep dive into CPU and GPU profiles.<p>I don&#x27;t really know what any of this means. You&#x27;re running a single-thread graphics API (OpenGL) in a browser (does WASM support background threads?). On any modern PC, that&#x27;s gonna look like 1 CPU thread doing all the work and the GPU idling 80% of the time waiting for something to happen.

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.<p>We&#x27;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&#x27;ve heard of the Figma approach almost sounds like the Adobe Flash&#x2F;Flex runtime.<p>That might only make sense for applications with high levels of information density and snappy reactivity requirements like Figma or Google Docs or a web map -- not for content-focused websites. Still, it&#x27;s interesting to wonder if our arguments would be more interesting these days if we were discussing those types of approaches, rather than just fighting about React vs. Svelte, or this JavaScript module loader vs. that one...