react-native-performance.s

Owner: Louis Lagrange

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In order to have an efficient application from the get-go, respect the following standards.

Why

Because a few seconds of page render, a laggy chart display or a buggy animation makes you lose customers, those tips will help you avoid that before it even happens. In order to have an efficient application from the get-go, respect the following standards.

General

Side note: You don't need to apply every of these standards right away (that would be premature optimization), but as your technical experience grows, you should adopt them along the way. These best practices are ordered by potential impact on performance.

• Use an up-to-date version of your dependencies, and first and foremost:

  • React Native

  • React Navigation

• Don't use images that are unnecessary big. Dynamic resizing is very inefficient on Android. Resize them to 1x 2x 3x flavors (img.png, [e-mail], [e-mail]) and use them normally (require('img.png')). UX designers can export images easily this way with Sketch.

• Use animations in order to make things more fluid (animationEnabled in TabNavigator; LayoutAnimation)

• Use shouldComponentUpdate / PureComponent. Test thoroughly your component when using shouldComponentUpdate because this is error-prone. It will massively improve your app's performance though.

• Don't create new functions on every render, bind your functions efficiently. Similarly, avoid creating inline styles.

• When using Animated, use useNativeDriver

• If you have a big view that has a lot of subviews, and these are not always shown to the user, use removeClippedSubviews

• When triggering a function after clicking on a button, or at componentDidMount, use InteractionManager.runAfterInteractions

• Remove console logs from your production builds, use the transform-remove-console Babel plugin

• When possible, use Fragment instead of View

• Try to limit the number of data you display in charts, maps and tables. To investigate the potential impact, try to divide this number by 10 and measure the impact with the tools presented in the profiling section

• Do not request your data to often: if it changes every hour, do not perform the same request every minutes, it will trigger useless renders and waste ressources.

Useless renders

• Use shouldComponentUpdate / PureComponent. Test thoroughly your component when using shouldComponentUpdate because this is error-prone. It will massively improve your app's performance though.

• Don't create new functions on every render, bind your functions efficiently.

• Do not request your data to often: if it changes every hour, do not perform the same request every minutes, it will trigger useless renders and waste ressources.

Displaying large list of elements

• Try to limit the number of data you display in charts, maps and tables. To investigate the potential impact, try to divide this number by 10 and measure the impact with the tools presented in the profiling section

• If you have a big view that has a lot of subviews, and these are not always shown to the user, use removeClippedSubviews

Technical debt

• Use an up-to-date version of your dependencies, and first and foremost:

  • React Native

  • React Navigation

• Remove console logs from your production builds, use the transform-remove-console Babel plugin

• When possible, use Fragment instead of View

Start-up times

If your app takes too much time to initialize, solve the problem incrementally:

1. Add a splashscreen that closes when the app is ready with react-native-splash-screen

2. If the startup time is > 2 seconds, show a full page modal with an animation (in the continuity of your splashscreen)

3. If the startup time is consistently > 5 seconds (or 7 seconds with an animated splashscreen): if you have a very big app, implement dynamic imports; if not, look for other clues: aren't you doing some long API calls at startup?

Good examples

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Bad examples

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