Hey folks,
I’ve been trying out Airtable for work and thinking about using it for personal stuff too. At work, we’ve got about 10K records in our base. It’s not huge, but it’s enough to get a feel for how it might handle bigger datasets.
I’ve set up an interface that checks our contacts. Sometimes it’s weird - the data doesn’t load right away and I have to refresh manually. Other times, it takes a while to show up, especially in the record detail view. We’re not talking about complex stuff here, just basic contact info like names and emails.
This got me wondering - is anyone else seeing this? Is it always like this or just a temporary glitch? I’m hoping to build something that can grow, but if it’s already slow with this amount of data, I’m not sure it’ll cut it.
What do you think? Any similar experiences or tips?
yeah, i’ve noticed some sluggishness too. especially with bigger bases. try breaking up your data into smaller tables or views, it helped me a bit. also, clearing cache and using a diff browser sometimes works. but tbh, airtable can be hit or miss with speed as it grows.
I’ve encountered similar performance issues with Airtable when managing larger datasets. In our case, performance noticeably declined as we neared 20K records. To address these challenges, I focused on optimizing the database structure by minimizing unnecessary columns, relying on filtered views to load only the most critical data, and routinely archiving older records to keep the active dataset smaller. While these measures have led to improved responsiveness, the underlying limitations remain apparent for large-scale operations. It might be worthwhile to consider other solutions if scalability is a primary concern for your project.
I’ve been using Airtable for a couple of years now, and I can relate to your experience. In my case, I manage a product inventory with about 15K items. The slowdowns became noticeable around the 12K mark.
One thing that helped was optimizing our formulas. We had some pretty complex ones that were slowing things down. Simplifying them or moving some calculations to scripting improved performance.
Also, we started using the Airtable API for bulk operations instead of the UI. It’s much faster for large updates or imports.
That said, there’s no denying Airtable has limits. For really large datasets, you might want to look into more robust database solutions. But for most small to medium projects, these tweaks should help keep things running smoothly.