When we talk about performance we’re usually referring to two separate but tightly connected things, size and speed. Each one affects the other and you’ll see that we discuss them both separately as well as together.

A good metaphor for thinking about doc performance is packing for a camping trip. The more gear you pack, the more comfortable you’ll be while camping. However, the more weight you carry, the slower you will hike. The less gear you pack, the faster and farther you go, but you'll be a little less comfortable.

There is always a balance to consider. This article aims to guide you in keeping your doc size healthy based on your specific use case and needs.

Doc size refers to how much storage space a doc uses and is measured in megabytes (MB). When you access a Coda doc, the full doc is downloaded into your browser cache so that you can work in it even without an internet connection. But the bigger the doc size, the tougher it is for your browser to run it.

The doc size distribution of all active Coda docs. Typically, you will only notice the impact of doc size, if your doc has reached the 80th percentile. Less than 1% of all active Coda docs are larger than the 20th percentile.

If the doc grows big enough, it may become too big for your browser to load at all, and your doc’s calculations may be turned off until its size is reduced. On lower powered devices such as mobile, you may notice issues arising even earlier. This is why downsizing the doc is a good idea - we want to catch things before it’s too late!

This section will cover the most likely culprits when it comes to doc size. If you need to scale down your doc to regain some speed, we recommend you start by considering the following:

The more columns you have in a table, the more space each row will take up. We have seen docs that run just fine with 100,000 rows and others that have trouble at 10,000 rows. It depends on your particular doc setup as to how many rows you can remove to bring the doc size down enough.

As a ballpark starting point, you can refer to the Formula Calculation Limit - found in your doc’s Statistics panel. Here you will see the percentage of space left before you hit the calculation limit. Note that if you’re not seeing the Formula Calculation Limit section, this means your doc is less than 50% of the way to the limit, so you are in good shape. If you have a 10,000 row table and you are at 99%, you will want to try removing 2,000 rows if your target is to get down to 80%.

After removing rows to bring your doc back down to a workable size, we recommend setting up a row archiving system to keep the doc size down moving forward. Check out this guide on row archiving to learn more.

Want more info? Check out this helpful guide on managing row count.

Check your doc for any stale tables or views - including sync tables - that are not being used anymore, and delete them. Before you do this, it’s a good idea to double-check that no other tables or formulas are reliant on the data in these tables.

In the doc map, you can check to see if a table has any connected views or if its data is referenced by any formulas in your doc:

If your table has zero connections or references, or if the connected tables or formulas are no longer relevant, you can proceed with deleting them.

Should you go to delete a table without first checking if it’s connected to anything important, Coda will let you know if the table has connections to review before it allows you to proceed with deleting.

Check out these guides on managing table count and managing view count for more info.

Not all canvas columns are an issue. But if you have canvas columns that have a default value that is rather complex, that can lead to a lot of content in each cell, which can contribute to hindered performance.

If your tables have Pack columns that pull in a ton of additional metadata, this may be contributing significantly to your doc size. We commonly see this with the Salesforce Pack, for example. When you hover over these metadata columns, you’ll see that there is lots of additional data within each cell of that column (as demonstrated in the gif below). Evaluate where you might be able to remove these Pack columns within your doc.

If you have a relation column that returns many row values per cell, it’s possible that this is taking up a lot of space in your overall doc size. Relations are a powerful feature in Coda, but when used to an extreme and returning 100’s of values per row, they can cause the column size to grow fairly large.

Removing columns like this or finding a different strategy can help both doc speed and doc size performance. See this resource on building best practices for more details on this.

If you’re still experiencing performance issue after working through the suggestions above, here are some more tips on reducing the size of your doc.

If you've got empty pages, subpages, or tables that no longer spark joy, or pages that are older versions of new-and-improved pages, consider deleting these older objects. Remember: views, controls and buttons can be deleted to free up space as well.

You may have a doc that contains a lot of data but that data isn't necessarily dependent on each other. It is a great idea in those cases to split up your doc into smaller docs focused on each individual use case. This can also help your team focus on work relevant to each use case.

You can conveniently copy pages into new docs. And with sync pages and Cross-doc, it’s easier than ever to keep separate docs feeling connected and bring the necessary info in from each. Check out this resource for more guidance on knowing when to create a new page vs a brand new doc!

If you have big tables containing data that is no longer needed (e.g. from last year), you can delete or archive those rows to another doc. Check out this resource to learn how to set up a convenient row archiving system.

Rather than deleting rows manually, you can use an automation to delete old rows. For example, you can set up an automation that runs once every night and deletes all rows older than 6 months. Learn more about using automations to archive old rows in this resource.