iPad Responding Slow

Am I using too old iPad mini which is causing the slowness of loading the pages and activating certain actions? It is impossible to load dashboard and sometimes the entire thing will crash and reopen

Video: https://youtu.be/k0L_nQDHZpk

Thanks for sharing the video - that certainly is very slow and is not the expected result! If you try on a modern phone or tablet, your experience should be much, much better.

Is this the original iPad Mini you’re referring to? If so, it’s around 8 years old now, so it’s likely not going to be the most performant device and it will feel sluggish compared to a modern device, but the experience in your video is certainly worse than expected.

That being said, there are some things you might try to optimize things for older devices.

Limit Total Number of Tiles

One of the biggest performance impacts for changing between dashboards is the total number of tiles on each dashboard - including Spacer Tiles.

I noticed that you are using a smaller base tile size. When tiles are positioned and blank space is left between them, the dashboard will automatically inject Spacer tiles. For example, on the first dashboard, you could have 24 individual Spacer tiles:

Replacing these with 3 large Spacer tiles would improve the performance in changing dashboards. (On a modern device you likely wouldn’t even notice the difference, but on older devices these things compound to become noticeable):

Similarly, when saving the dashboard, if it prompts you to delete excess Spacer Tiles, make sure you do that. Extra spacer tiles at the end of the dashboard (after the last ‘real’ tile) can slow things down unnecessarily.

Minimize the Use of Media / Backgrounds

Again, on modern devices, you likely wouldn’t notice a difference, but the use of media resources can impact the performance on certain older tablets. You might have to play with this to get a feel for what makes the biggest difference on your tablet.

For example, you might start by putting together a simple dashboard or two with no Media Tiles and no backgrounds. As an ideal test case, maybe just two dashboards where the only tile on them is a link to the other dashboard to get a feel for the baseline performance on this device. Then you could try slowly adding features to get a feel for the impact on your device. For example, start by adding just a dashboard background and try navigating between them again to get a feel for performance. Then add a single Media Tile and try navigating between them again (then progressively add your other Media TIles).

Similarly, I’d be curious if the device control is always that slow or if it was a factor of the device being bogged down and still trying to load the dashboard. I noticed on the second dashboard that it was still lagging, trying to catch up with loading the background image. (eg. tiles visible > tap > background loaded > spinner showed up on tile [command sending])

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