While scrolling every message in the chat is rebuilt which is causing performance issues

[ghost]

While scrolling every message in the chat is rebuilt which is causing performance issues.

So for eg. i have custom message with 3 images, every time i scroll its rebuilt which makes the app laggy and gives bad experience for the user.

Just wanted to know if the listview.builder is used in the package ? and also when this can be fixed because i feel this is a very big issue wrt performance as it crashes the app for our clients.

[demchenkoalex]

Hey @aronfernandes-cci with listview builder it will also be rebuilt :D I guess I do not need to describe a concept of recycling views when every list item is destroyed when going off the screen and then created from a copy when entering. This is expected.

The problem is in the poorly written code. It is simply bad. When I started all this I had minimal Flutter knowledge.

I noticed all these issues too and I basically removed all the code one day and started from scratch with all knowledge gained, on a v2 branch. There I try to use all best practices and I always check performance metrics so I know that the foundation I build on is performant. I tried showing thousands of messages on v2 branch and it was fast, where v1 lags after like 30. Unfortunately I can't provide a "fix" for v1, cause it is all bad, it was practically easier to write from scratch than fix it.

Currently I am working on fixing images being reloaded after I change message id or remove elements from the list, maybe it is something related to your own problem. I finally figured I can do a custom image provider to fix the issue, so doing exactly this now. Then I will test my solution against api, firebase and chat GPT to see that everything is performant and foundation works. Only after that I will be able to release some alpha version, but it will be super simple at first. Then I will start adding features from v1/accepting contributions and finally adding long requested stuff like replies, reactions and audio messages.

Given I spent like a month trying to fix the images I can't give you a timeline. Sometimes I will just face some blocker I don't know how to solve and will be trying a million of different things. All after my full time job and some personal life at least.

[ghost]

thank you for the information and help. and also problem only comes with scrolling custom messages and custom image messages. Text messages scroll very smoothly.

[Riki1200]

I suggest you customize bubbleBuilder when you try to valid type of message, for example, you can try to resize image o compress every image in the chat.

there's a lot method to do something for this

[robcleghorn]

Thanks for the huge effort, super grateful. How about an initial release without image support so we can all get our hands on it?

[demchenkoalex]

did not work on this for the last month (lots of work) I feel I am almost there with images and will try to finish at least v2 preview in the coming month

[demchenkoalex]

v2 dev build is released and I focused on performance there with as little rebuilds as possible, hopefully not an issue anymore.