Is anyone else's complex prototype not working properly?

We’ve filed support tickets concerning prototype malfunctions and performance issues in the past, but I’d love to hear how this is going for other teams.

Basically we have a very complex prototype we use for user testing. Not a huge number of screens, but a lot of variables, conditional statements and some rather complex components.

Performance is abysmal, and crashes are frequent. We’ve had everything from lagging and freezing to the “Something went wrong” error screen and, most recently, a “Prototype is too big for this device – Try viewing it on a computer” error message I hadn’t encountered before. This is on an iPhone 15. I’d love some feedback as to what makes it “too big”, or any other kind of pointers as to what might improve the situation and what others have tried.

There are two approaches we’re considering, but they’re not worth sinking time and effort into if they won’t resolve our problems:

  1. Detach as many components as we can – not something we’d prefer because it would render pushing design system updates to the prototype impossible.
  2. Get rid of all variables and conditional logic and create an old fashioned “dummy” prototype that doesn’t account for complex use cases.

Both components and variables are highly hyped-up selling points for Figma. Having them fail repeatedly is frustrating, and it doesn’t seem that there is any fix in sight that allows us to use them as advertised.