Performance

Loading performance is key to streamlining your operations. Here are a few steps we recommend taking to ensure your Forest is optimized.

Please be sure of your agent type and version and pick the right documentation accordingly.

This is the documentation of the forest-express-sequelize and forest-express-mongoose Node.js agents that will soon reach end-of-support.

forest-express-sequelize v9 and forest-express-mongoose v9 are replaced by @forestadmin/agent v1.

Please check your agent type and version and read on or switch to the right documentation.

Performance

Please find here all the hands-on best practices to keep your admin panel performant. Depending on your user's needs, you might either hide or optimize some fields to limit the number of components, avoid a large datasets display or rework complex logic.

You can display bellow performances improvement tricks in this video. For any further help to improve admin panel performances, get in touch with the community.

Layout optimization

1. Show only Smart fields you absolutely need.

As you can see in the Loading time benchmark below, Smart fields can be quite costly in terms of loading performance. Limiting them to those you need is key.

2. Reduce the number of records per page

3. Reduce the number of fields displayed

You can hide some fields in your table view; this will not prevent you from seeing them in the record details view.

Relationship fields are links to other collection records within your table view:

Having Relationship fields can decrease your performance, especially if your tables have a lot of records. Therefore you should display only those you need and use!

Optimize smart fields performance

To optimize your smart field performances, please check out this section.

Restrict search on specific fields

Sometimes, searching in all fields is not relevant and may even result in big performance issues. You can restrict your search to specific fields only using the searchFields option.

In this example, we configure Forest Admin to only search on the fields name and industry of our collection companies.

/forest/companies.js
const { collection } = require('forest-express-sequelize');

collection('companies', {
  searchFields: ['name', 'industry'],
});

Disable pagination count

This feature is only available if you're using the forest-express-sequelize (v8.5.3+), forest-express-mongoose (v8.6.5+), forest-rails (v7.5.0+) or django-forestadmin (v1.2.0+) agent.

To paginate tables properly, Forest Admin triggers a separate request to fetch the number of records.

In certain conditions, usually, when your database reaches a point where it has a lot of records, this request can decrease your loading performance. In this case, you can choose to disable it...

  • adding the deactivateCountMiddleware like so:

/routes/books.js
const { PermissionMiddlewareCreator, deactivateCountMiddleware } = require('forest-express-sequelize');

...

// Get a number of Books
router.get('/books/count', deactivateCountMiddleware);

To disable the count request in the table of a relationship (Related data section):

/routes/books.js
router.get(
  '/books/:recordId/relationships/companies/count',
  deactivateCountMiddleware
);

You can also disable the count request in a collection only in certain conditions. For instance, you can disable the count if you're using a filter:

/routes/books.js
// Get a number of Books when you have a filtering
router.get('/books/count', (request, response, next) => {
  if (request.query.filters) {
    next(); // count will be done
  } else {
    deactivateCountMiddleware(request, response);
  }
});

One more example: you may want to deactivate the pagination count request for a specific team:

router.get('/books/count', (request, response, next) => {
  // Count is deactivated for the Operations team
  if (request.user.team === 'Operations') {
    deactivateCountMiddleware(request, response);
    // Count is made for all other teams
  } else {
    next();
  }
});

Database Indexing

Indexes are a powerful tool used in the background of a database to speed up querying. It power queries by providing a method to quickly lookup the requested data. As Forest Admin generates SQL queries to fetch your data, creating indexes can improve the query response time.

5. Index the Primary and Unique Key Columns

The syntax for creating an index will vary depending on the database. However, the syntax typically includes a CREATE keyword followed by the INDEX keyword and the name we’d like to use for the index. Next should come the ON keyword followed by the name of the table that has the data we’d like to quickly access. Finally, the last part of the statement should be the name(s) of the columns to be indexed.

CREATE INDEX <index_name>ON <table_name> (column1, column2, ...)

For example, if we would like to index phone numbers from a customers table, we could use the following statement:

CREATE INDEX customers_by_phoneON customers (phone_number)

The users cannot see the indexes, they are just used to speed up searches/queries.

6. Index the Foreign Key Columns

Foreign key columns should be indexed if they are used intensively in Smart fields. In the table below, you can see how drastically it reduces the loading time of the page.

Updating a table with indexes takes more time than updating a table without (because the indexes also need an update). So, only create indexes on columns that will be frequently searched against.

Loading time benchmark

Below is the outcome of a performance test on page load time of the Table view. It highlights the importance of using indexes and limiting the number of columns and lines.

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