Troubleshooting: Performance and live collaboration

Potential issues

This section covers the performance and live collaboration issues that you may be experiencing. For each of these issues, we recommend testing out the steps found in our Basic troubleshooting article before moving into the additional troubleshooting options that are outlined in the Troubleshooting steps section below.

Long load time

Most documents are expected to load within ten seconds. Larger documents are expected to take a little longer to load. If a document takes more than thirty seconds to load there may be something wrong. Refer to the Troubleshooting steps section for suggestions to improve your document performance.

Slow response time

If you are experiencing significant lag when zooming or moving around the Lucid canvas, it may be due to a variety of causes like network connection or configuration issues or rendering limitations on your local device. Refer to the Troubleshooting steps section below for suggestions to optimize your document performance.

Lack of collaborator visibility

If your connection isn’t allowing you to see other collaborators on a document, you may see the following message:

• “Real-time collaboration may not be working. Refresh the page, try again, and contact support if the problem continues.”

If you see the above message or otherwise believe that you are experiencing issues or delays collaborating with others in a Lucid document, we recommend that you go through the Troubleshooting steps section below.

Troubleshooting steps

Try basic troubleshooting first

Sometimes issues with document performance are related to browser or network issues. Check out our Basic troubleshooting article for more information and return here for any remaining issues. 
In particular, the Basic troubleshooting article will walk you through the following:

• Check your local device against the system requirements.
• Check your browser and network connection. 
• Turn WebGL on or off.

Check the Lucid diagnostics page

Visit Lucid’s diagnostics page. From this page you can check the following, depending on the issue you’re running into:

• Check to see if there are network configuration issues and see what the response times are for different services. Sometimes network configuration will cause one or more of Lucid’s servers to connect slower and slow down response times.
• Check if your computer supports faster rendering. Lucid supports rendering with all types of hardware, but some are much more responsive than others. The diagnostics page tells you if your computer supports WebGL—which is the faster modern rendering engine available on most modern computers. If not supported, you will likely see slower responsiveness. Check your browser settings for ways to enable WebGL or talk to your IT team about getting an upgraded laptop.
• Ensure no services are being blocked by firewall, ad blockers, or network configuration. Parts of the application that transmit collaborator updates in real-time may be blocked which will cause you to not see others or their changes on the document. If this is the case, remove ad blockers or contact your IT team to help resolve the issue. The diagnostics page shows which servers can’t be accessed.

Decrease document size

In any Lucid document

• Reduce the amount of images and GIFs on the document.
• Ensure your document has fewer than 10,000 total objects for optimal performance, especially if your document contains a large number of images, GIFs, or Lucid cards.
• If the document needs to be frequently viewed, but not edited, consider publishing it to create a view-only URL. Published documents load much more quickly.

In Lucidchart

• Split a large or data intensive Lucidchart document into multiple documents. This can be done by copying and pasting the content into a new document or importing a Lucidchart page into another document.
• Remove conditional formatting or use simpler shapes.

In Lucidspark

• Limit the amount of freehand drawing on the board.
• Use Breakout Boards to break up content.
• Ensure that you have fewer than 300 Lucid Cards on your board.
• Reduce the amount of images and gifs on the board.
• If you are on a Zoom call, use Lucidspark’s Facilitator Tools instead of sharing your screen.

Decrease active collaborator participation

Lucid is designed for collaboration and supports multiple collaborators on a single document at once. That being said, if a significant number of users are working on the same document simultaneously it can slow down performance. For optimal performance, we recommend the following:

• Limit to 100 collaborators actively participating on the document or 200 users viewing the document. Otherwise break up into separate documents in Lucidchart, or use breakout boards in Lucidspark.
  • We recommend no more than 50 editors per breakout board. 
• Pause editing for 60 seconds. Taking a break when working with a large number of collaborators can give the program time to catch up, resulting in better performance.
• Hide inactive collaborator cursors if you are collaborating with 20 or more people.
   

Post in the Lucid Community

If none of the steps or resources above resolve the issue, search the Lucid Community for the answer to your question or post a new question to get support.