I am currently evaluating Penpot, playing around with prototyping a bit and trying out example files. I am well aware that there’s a renderer rewrite on the way that is supposed to fix perf issues. However, I assumed that current performance issues would appear in relatively complex prototypes or with lots of complex SVGs. Instead, I experience quite extreme lag and basically the UI coming to a complete hault for seconds when interacting with some of the example projects (that btw are suggested on the Penpot starting page). I’d say the frame rate of my browser drops to like 1 or 2 fps.
More specifically:
Plants prototype: When I open this example file and then zoom into the first screen (with the full screen plant background photo), when the zoom level gets really high, performance drops to extreme lows
Flex layout playground: Basically, this project is unusable for me. When I hover over one of the presentation slides (e. g. the very first one) and then try to pan the view or to zoom, the performance drops even more badly than in the plants prototype. To the point of Penpot / the browser being frozen for seconds.
When importing one PNG that has a few MBs: Again, everything comes to a hault when either moving around in the file or when zooming (zooming a lot that is).
What’s weird is, MacOS activity monitor doesn’t show CPU / GPU / memory spikes or anything. So what is going on? Maybe I’m doing something wrong? Is that extremely poor performance expected?
My system: I have tried both Firefox and Chrome. While Chrome performs slightly better, it is far from good. The same choppiness, just a bit less pronounced. I’m using a M1 Macbook Air with 16 GB RAM. I’m using penpot.app (PaaS).
I hope I’m simply doing sth. wrong and there’s an explanation.
As I’m not an Apple specialist I’m not able to help you much but I have a few things for you to try and see it if has any impact on the overall performance…
1- Try using Safari on Penpot. See what results you get there;
2- Try disabling extensions you know that could be resource hogging;
3- Try using the Penpot Desktop client (if supported);
That’s all I can think of this rn. I also have a hunch that maybe Penpot is not as optimized for ARM devices such as yours, so maybe the problem is on the lack of optimization and not in the way you’re using Penpot. Well, that’s all I can think of it.
Hey @RenanMayrinckDesign ! Thanks a lot for trying to help! So, the only thing that I still can try is the desktop app. But given that app is by all likelihood just a wrapper around chrome, I don’t expect any difference in performance. As for the other suggestions: I ran chrome(ium) completely blank and freshly installed, so it was not a matter of browser add-ons. There were also no other tabs open.
Regarding the ARM theory, idk, I guess that’s only sth. the devs could answer. However, I doubt it’s the source of my issues, because Penpot itself is a web app and it’s a matter of how well the browsers are optimized for ARM, not so much Penpot itself. AFAIK, all major browsers (Chrome, FF, Safari) perform very decently on ARM Macs. But ultimately, I’m just assuming.
I’m also waiting for the new rendering engine. For now, when the project contains many elements, I’ve found that the “focus” function helps a lot. I work on an “isolated” element and the performance improves significantly. Obviously, if this element also contains large objects, like very large images, performance suffers in any case.
I’m a MAC user and performance is an issue, but I will give it to MAC because of its systems. The Windows version of Brave handles Penpot better, wired but fact. The new render engine will help both systems significantly.
I have encountered similar issues while designing a join form.
Dragging and dropping into grids seemed to be the primary trigger, and the system would lock up for some time before it would eventually catch up. I lost some work at one point because of the issue.
However, I now think this may have been caused by my password manager detecting the input fields and attempting to fill in details without success.
I ran several tests in different browsers, but the password manager extension was usually present.
I am now using the Penpot Desktop since it removes any possibility of browser extensions causing issues and saves me from disabling them. It seems like a smoother experience so far.
Hey @Rips , thanks, yeah it’s good to be aware of browser add-ons. But this does not solve it for me. Certain documents exhibit horrible performance (basically unusable) no matter what.
I was just surprised, since they are example files that are advertised by penpot, so I assumed they should work fine. But I think they just don’t and at its core it’s a penpot issue. It doesn’t matter if add-ons or not / desktop app or not.
…so zooming seems to be a known performance issue and hopes seem to be that the new renderer will fix that 
