How Many Users Can Bubble Apps Support? (Critical for Scale)

how many users can your bubble app really support the answer to this is actually not a hard number if you're looking to build a scalable application that should be able to support many users then you need to be asking a different question it's Gabby over at coaching no code apps we help non-technical entrepreneurs build custom apps so that they can launch their app-based businesses or grow their existing businesses all without coding so how many users can my bubble application support this is a question we see come up all the time in trying to understand the scalability of the platform is it even possible to sign up thousands if not more users to the application well let's get that literal question out of the way once you are on a paid plan you can create as many user accounts as you want there's actually no limit to the number of users that sign up to your app same is true for any other custom data types that you've designed in your database architecture when you're on the free plan of course there is a limit of 200 entries across all of your types so keep that in mind but once you're on a paid app and you're ready to go live there is no limit but again this isn't the question that you need to be asking it's not about the literal number of users it's actually what the users are doing and how can you create an application that will support high volume of activity in your app regardless of the number of people that have signed up whether it's 10 users or 10 000 or a hundred thousand or more it's about the performance of your application overall and there's many factors that go into a well-performing scalable application the first thing that we typically start with is looking at your database structure this is really important because with any data-driven application how you store and organize all of your data how things are related to each other how you query your database is going to have a big impact on the rest of the application so whether this is for the user data type specifically or really any other custom type how you approach the structure really matters let's take a look at a quick example of an application where we have service providers who are doing home repairs for clients so there's two different types of users for this apple application we have the service providers themselves and the clients or the customers they both need to log into the application and the app needs to know different info about them so one approach you can take is to break down all of that information into separate data types because with bubble it's actually better to have more records in the database again you don't have those limits for the number of entries when you're on those paid plans it's better to have more entries in the database that are smaller in size compared to less records so if everything is kind of combined into one big data type one table that are bigger in size now when I say in size I'm referring to a few things think about the number of fields that you are setting up in that data type so consider one data type with a hundred fields and compare that to 10 data types with 10 Fields each well you've helped bubble here you've broken things down made things a little bit more manageable and the individual size of every record is much smaller so so querying the database can return results a lot faster you know you can create all sorts of relationships to get the data that you need even if things are spread across different types now depending on what you're doing we'll of course dictate how practical it is to break things down into however many types right so with our example with the clients and service providers not only will the the users have a user record right because they need to have their email and password they need to be able to get into the app but once we identify who they are the rest of the information that is specific to them can be stored elsewhere we can store client information in a client record provider information in a provider record and you can have relationships to other data from there right so providers might be tied to a company that is going to have many employees multiple providers right so they're all kind of working as a team and users can be both if they want to be both a client and a provider well great that just means that you're going to have both a client and provider record for that one into vigil but you're helping bubble with the performance of searches and also how you display those results back to the user by breaking things down okay that's just kind of a performance rule of thumb less records that are bigger in size is not going to be as efficient as more records that are smaller in size now also when I say in size I'm not just talking about the number of fields but what is it that you're actually saving to these fields are we talking about really large images or video files or lots and lots and lots of text okay so what you save to each record really matters as well okay one data type with 100 Fields that's all simple text it's like one word per field is actually a lot smaller than a small data type let's say with three Fields where you're storing gigabytes worth of videos and images okay so it's a fine balance between what it is you're actually saving how much your save giving per record and just how much you're spreading it across multiple data types so the structure of your database is obviously important but you also want to take a few other performance factors into account and I've broken things down into these key components the first is workflows workflows have a varying level of complexity you have complete control over what a workflow is going to do so compare a simple workflow with maybe two actions against a more complex workflow with 20 actions with conditions on some of those actions pointing to different Pathways they're triggering other events right those could get really involved and so the more complex the workflow the heavier the load that bubble needs to process okay and not only that but think about the frequency of the workflow if one user is triggering a complex workflow back to back to back that's an even heavier load and on top of that think about the volume here so let's take one user back to back to back of a comp Plex workflow multiply that by a hundred users doing the exact same thing at the same time so you can see it's not necessarily about the number of users alone it's about what they're doing and how you've designed your logic to carry out certain functions you know you may need to approach a complex workflow so that things can be broken down maybe things are spaced out to happen over a bigger period of time that way bubble can reduce the load over a certain amount of time that's going to contribute to your capacity that has been allowed for your application okay you could have one person really running up the capacity in your application and have you know an equivalent of a hundred people running up the same amount of capacity for a much lighter weight workflow it's a balance it's about what's actually happening in the app okay the next aspect we have here is search this is a huge Factor because again depending on how you structured your database is going to affect how efficient searches are done and how how quickly results will return back to the user if you haven't structured your database properly you could lead to a lot heavier of a load for bubble to go through so make sure that your database structures are efficient they're not overworked you know you want to overdo uh relationships and things like that but you want to make things as clean and efficient as possible so filters on your searches are going to have a big effect on how well they perform Advanced filters or just many constraints add to a search the way that you manage the results so how much data are you wanting to display back to the user and also the data sources is your data coming from the built-in database in your app is it coming from plugins from Custom States from API connections a lot of these are also going to contribute to the overall performance and you need to manage those things in a balanced way design very similar how you create the logic around how data is presented back to the the user can have a really big impact you don't want to ask bubble to display thousands of items on a page you know number one the user's not going to be able to see all of that all at once so with tables for example you want to control how much you show them at a time maybe the first 10 to 20 items at a time have them page through the next set of 10 to 20 and that really controls the load okay again with displaying data you're going to be working with various data sources and you're going to be passing data around the user is interacting with the application filling out forms triggering other workflows they may need to generate data on the spot and it's going to be passed around to various elements or even between pages the final aspect here is just the capacity in general that your app can handle so when we talk about capacity what we're really measuring is the load over time how much is happening and what is happening over a certain period of time if you're asking bubble to process a really heavy load whether it's a heavy search a heavy workflow right that is really complicated with many conditions and filters over a very short span of time that's a heavy ask it doesn't matter how many people necessarily are triggering it because again one person could be triggering that heavy load compared to a hundred people triggering light loads but all at the same time you may end up with the same amount of load you know over that span of time and so your application is allocated a certain amount of capacity that's something that you'll want to monitor you can build the most efficient application and if you simply have an environment where there's a lot going on you'll need to upgrade add more units of capacity to your application up upgrade to the next plan again that's something that you just need to Monitor and notice that it doesn't necessarily link back to a hard number of users it's about what they're doing how often they're doing it how frequently and how much is going on at the same time if you want to learn more about how to build a scalable app on bubble head to coaching.codeapps.com bubble scalability that guide will teach you strategies for scaling on Bubble Plus what will cause an unscalable app and what you should avoid doing so head over to coachingknocodeapps.com bubblescalability for the free guide foreign [Music]

Channel: Coaching No Code Apps

Views: 16,635

Keywords: bubble.io, bubble app scalability, how many users can bubble apps support, user volume on bubble apps, bubble.io tutorial, bubble.io lesson, how to build an app on bubble, no code app development, bubble, are bubble apps scalable, scalability on bubble, can bubble apps handle 10k users, bubble bootcamp, bubble.io platform

Id: nDedya8ps7M

Length: 10min 45sec (645 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 25 2023