Hey @Universalnick, sorry to hear about the performance issues!

This sounds related to a known issue with deeply nested instances that our engineers are aware can cause lag.

Every time an instance changes, Figma goes through a series of calculations to layout the instance and all of its nested layers. Every layer of nesting significantly increases the complexity here. This means if you have a lot of nested components, then any interactions you trigger may cause a huge amount of layouts, leading to slow performance.

If you’re able to reduce any levels of component nesting, then we’d recommend doing so for best performance.

We also know that large or complex component sets can cause similar performance issues, especially when they contain images, nested instances, or other elements which are complex to render on change, and would suggest trying to reduce the size of any component sets whenever possible.

It’s common to see this when you’ve bound variables to your component properties as when a variable changes, and a component has that variable bound as a variant property, all the instances that are derived from that component have to layout, as well as all its descendants. So, while the variables themselves aren’t slowing down the prototype, they can lead to more component and instance layouts being recalculated, leading to slower performance.