Figma prototypes are very slow

Hi there,

Have you attempted to reboot your browser or desktop application? Here’s how:

• For the Browser: Please exit your browser application entirely, then launch Figma in a new browser window.
• For the Desktop App: You might need to force-quit the Figma desktop app, then restart it.

Is the issue occurring in both the Figma app and the browser?

• If it’s only happening in the Figma app, could you try clearing your cache? Here’s a guide to help you do that: Clearing Cache Guide
• If the issue is only present in the browser, disabling extensions one at a time could potentially solve the problem. Could you test this out? Here’s how: Disabling Extensions Guide

Also, if you’re using blend modes for your layers, this could potentially affect the performance of your prototype. In such cases, setting the blend mode to ‘Pass through’ (for layers only) or ‘Normal’ could improve performance. Here’s more on that: Blend Modes Guide

If the issue persists, could you reach out directly to the support team with a copy of your file: https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/requests/new?

Please make sure you use the email associated with your Figma account, include links to the file in question, and share access with support-share@figma.com. Don’t worry, inviting us to view your file won’t impact your billing.

Thanks!
Toku

For others having similar issues:

I reached out to Figma support who investigated my design file and came back with this response:

Taking a look at your file, I can also reproduce the lagging behavior but I believe this unfortunately seems to be occurring due to a limitation our team is actively tracking where deeply nested component instances can contribute to noticeably slower performance in prototypes.

For your reference, every time a component instance is updated (for example in an interaction in the prototype), Figma needs to recompute the layout of all of the instance’s sublayers including any nested instances. These calculations include, but are not limited to determining new variant states, transferring instance overrides, and computing updated dimensions for any nested objects and can unfortunately Each added layer of nesting in a component can significantly increase the complexity of the calculations that need to be performed by the prototype viewer and this results in slower performance when triggering interactions on components with a large hierarchy.

The best suggestion we can make at this time to improve the performance is to flatten your hierarchies as much as possible. For example, you can consider detaching top level instances, flattening any vector assets and reducing the amount of nested container frames in your component with larger hierarchies. We understand this may not always be ideal, but you should see a significant performance increase from reducing the number of nested instances in your base frames.

So for now I will wait for an update that fixes this issue and until then I will use workarounds to make prototypes usuable for user testing.

That’s the same response our team received last month for the same support request, verbatim. So we can deduce that this has been a known issue at least for the past six months, which makes me somewhat more hopeful that it will be addressed in the future.

We are experiencing this issue as well.

The performance issues seem to be compounded when implementing interactivity with variables.

Hi ​@Thomas_Klepl 

Thanks for flagging.

To help us investigate further, could you please share some details with our support team? A bug report outlining the steps that led to the issue would be very helpful. You can submit a report easily through this link: https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/articles/360041468234-Submit-a-bug-report

Thank you in advance for your assistance!

Toku

+1-- The prototype performance is really unacceptable at this point.