Speeding up a big board

A board with several hundred nodes on it asks a lot of your browser: every node is drawn every time you move the canvas. If panning and zooming feel sticky, two settings will help.

Both live under Board settings → Performance, and both apply to every board on this device. They’re deliberately not board settings: a board isn’t slow, a machine is. Turning one on won’t change anything for the people you share the board with, won’t mark the board unsaved, and won’t use up an undo.

1. Open Board settings from the toolbar.

2. Scroll to Performance.

3. Turn on whichever you need. They take effect immediately.

Soften while moving

While you’re panning or zooming, each node flattens to its card shape and colour — the text, pictures and connection labels drop out — and everything comes back a fraction of a second after you stop.

The detail you lose is detail you couldn’t read mid-movement anyway, and the things that go first (the frosted-glass blur, the drop shadows) are the most expensive things on the canvas to redraw.

Turn it on if the board stutters as you move around it. Leave it off if you find the flicker distracting on a board small enough not to need it.

Tip

On a really large board, turn this on together with the setting below. Softening helps most when there are fewer nodes on screen to soften, so the two work better as a pair than either does alone.

Note

Connection labels always disappear once you’re zoomed out past about 40%, whether or not this setting is on. They’re unreadable at that size and still cost time to draw.

Only render what’s on screen

Nodes outside your current view stop being drawn at all until you pan back to them. On a very large board where you work in one corner at a time, this is the biggest single improvement available.

It switches itself off automatically for the few things that need the whole board at once — exporting a PDF, regenerating the thumbnail, running an auto-layout, and presenting frames — so none of those come out with pieces missing.

Caution

If an export or a layout ever behaves oddly, turn this one off first and try again.

Things that help regardless

Frames instead of one huge canvas

Splitting a sprawling board into frames means you can jump between areas rather than zooming across everything in between.

Collapse containers you're not using

A collapsed container hides its children from the canvas entirely, which is the cheapest saving there is.

Tidy the connections

Lines crossing hundreds of nodes are hard to read and slow to draw. Tidy connections routes them around the clutter.

Most text nodes cost nothing until you write in them

Sticky notes, text boxes, paper nodes and story prose only build their editor once you open them, so reading a board is much cheaper than authoring one. No setting needed — this is always on.

Related

• Boards
• Boards on a phone
• Edges on boards — including Tidy connections
• Frames on boards
• Arranging nodes