Appearance of auto-Layout randomly changing over-night…

Hi ​@wgo, thanks for reaching out! 

We appreciate your Figma loyalty. I would definitely also consider you an experienced user after six years. Since you clearly know your way around Figma, your instinct about it being a rendering/cache issue sounds spot on. The double-click-to-fix behavior is a classic sign that Figma is caching stale layout data rather than anything actually changing in your file properties.

Here are a few things worth trying:

Recompute text layout

• ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Open Quick Actions (Cmd + /) and run Recompute text layout in selection. This is especially useful for deeply nested files where text layers can silently miscalculate.

Force a full re-render

• ​​​​​​​Double-clicking works per component, but you can also try selecting all frames on a page and nudging them 1px and back to force Figma to recompute everything.

Clear the Figma desktop cache

• Since this is happening consistently, a stale cache is the most likely culprit. Here's how to clear it.

Check for library updates

• Is this file connected to a shared component library? An overnight push from a library update could cascade resizing changes into your instances.

Lastly, a couple of questions to help narrow this down further:

• Does this happen across all pages of the file, or specific ones?
• Are the affected components local components or library instances?

Hopefully these help, but let me know how it goes!

Hi ​@djv , thanks so much for your detailed answer!

I’ll save all these mentioned actions and will try them once something odd in that directions ever happens again. “Unfortunately” I couldn’t keep any of these hick-ups for further testing, to avoid confusion on my Devs side…

But to answer you questions:

• it happened only on some pages and I couldn’t recognise a pattern there
• both, local and library components were affected. Or to be more precise: instances of a component were affected. The component source was fine in each case.

But it wasn’t always the same component. For example, the first time it happened roughly 2 months ago, when some instances of a library component, that uses “width: hug”, were suddenly just 1px wide. Or the most recent one were instances of a local component, where the alignment of its content was miscalculated – the error was the same in each instance affected but only some instances were affected. So the appearance of these two hick-ups (and some other cases in between) were not really related other than being auto-layout components. I know, this sounds quite vague, sorry. I’ll take screenshots when it ever happens again.

But for now thanks again for your help and have a nice weekend.

Best,
Werner

Hi ​@djv again,

 Ok, it happened sooner than I hoped for… once again, an instance using “hug” for height appeared only 1px high resulting in enclosing auto-layouts to also render wrong.

But I can add some more details:

• Only the rendering in the desktop app is affected, in the browser everything is fine
• Re-render text layout did not help
• Resetting the Figma app made unfortunately no difference
• Selecting all and moving 1px did not help
• Double-clicking the instance fixed it
• Also trying to open the layer structure of that instance fixed it – so I couldn’t measure the actual height of the affected instance but I assume it was 1px.
• Copying the corrupted instance and pasting it somewhere else results in a correct instance but the one copied from stays the same.
• Even copying the complete screen-layout and pasting that results in a layout with a correct instance of the corrupted one.
• And yes, the file is connected to a library but no updates for this particular component are available.

The file is worked on for quite some time now and has maybe become a bit large, but unfortunately, I cannot split it into smaller files, as many external links point into this particular file. But here’s a screenshot of the memory usage, if that’s helpful:

And here’s what the bug looked like: the height of the dialog’s footer is rendered too low, resulting in the contained buttons to hang outside its boundaries.

Best,

Werner

It also happens to me from time to time. You come back to the file, everything is misaligned, and you have to double click everywhere to fix it. 

It’s either : 

• an auto layout bug like mentioned before
• text that reverts to a previous state (like the text used to be “Hello” and was changed to “Hi”, but it displays “Hello” until you double click on it and auto corrects)

Hi ​@wgo, thank you for the detailed breakdown!  

This is exactly the kind of info that helps our engineering team understand what’s really going on. I’ve gone ahead and created a support ticket on your behalf (ticket #1946341), so our team can investigate further with you directly.

Please keep an eye on your inbox, and someone from support will be in touch soon. 

For reference, it happened again today : 

Before double clicking :

After double clicking : 

Thanks for following up, ​@Apolline! 

The team suggests Regenerating all instances to get your instances working as expected across all files involved. There's a quick action called "Regenerate all instances" (which is different from the "Recompute text layout in selection" I previously suggested) that re-fetches all the instances in a file and forces them to re-render.

When you have a moment, please try the following:

1. Open the affected file
2. Click on Actions from the bottom toolbar
3. Search for "Regenerate All Instances"
4. Run this command
5. Refresh the file

If this doesn't resolve the issue, please let me know, and I'll help get you connected to our Technical Quality support team.