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J Jacques Feb 1, 2025

Why is the demo version so slow?

I develop a lot of Laravel sites. I have waterhole running on development server along with other laravel installations, with much more db calls, controllers etc. I have put Waterhole (standalone) in production mode, disabled debugging and I have enabled all the caching etc.

Other laravel sites load any page, even on first load in less than a second. With tons of queries.

But waterhole, on firts load, same server, 8gb of memory, it's own CPUs - really a good environment, takes about 4 seconds to load on first load. Thereafter, about 1.-1.4 seconds. This is with one user on the site.

Why is that? Is it because it is the demo version? Is the licensed version faster? Is the demo version throttled somehow?

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Toby Toby Waterhole Founder Feb 14, 2025

The free trial is the exact same code as the licensed version, there's no throttling or anything of the kind.

Make sure you've followed all of the recommendations in the Deploying Optimization docs.

Other than that, it's a known issue that Waterhole's rendering can be a tad slow, due to the extensible component-based architecture. It's noticeable on the homepage because there are a lot of components rendered for each post in the list. It's definitely something I'd like to improve in the future.

It is very much proportional to CPU speed so on waterhole.dev we use a droplet with a "premium" CPU to make it go a bit faster.

You could also consider reducing the number of posts per page in your config (though understand that's not ideal).