We've been conducting an internal performance audit of our Runway workflows, specifically focusing on the user experience when loading substantial, mature projects. Our primary pain point is the significant latency observed from clicking a project name to achieving a fully interactive editor state. This delay is materially impacting our creative iteration speed.
Based on preliminary browser developer tools analysis, the bottleneck appears not to be asset download sizes (though those are non-trivial), but rather the sequential nature of several client-server round trips and client-side processing phases before the UI is responsive. I suspect inefficiencies in one or more of the following areas:
* **Initial state hydration:** The serialization and deserialization of the complete project graph, including all media metadata, layer data, and edit history.
* **Asset manifest resolution:** The process of resolving and validating the list of assets (images, video clips, generated media) before populating the media bins.
* **Third-party script orchestration:** The loading and initialization of various editor components and their dependencies.
To move beyond speculation, we have begun constructing a synthetic benchmarking suite to quantify this. Our methodology involves:
* Creating project templates of varying scales (e.g., 50, 200, 500 media assets).
* Using Puppeteer to automate load sequences, measuring key timings.
* Isolating variables such as network condition (throttled vs. unthrottled).
A simplified snippet of our measurement logic for the critical path:
```javascript
// Puppeteer page load tracing
const metrics = await page.evaluate(() => ({
dcl: performance.timing.domContentLoadedEventEnd - performance.timing.navigationStart,
load: performance.timing.loadEventEnd - performance.timing.navigationStart,
// Custom marker for "editor ready" (requires Runway-specific element)
editorInteractive: performance.getEntriesByName('editor-interactive')[0]?.startTime || 0
}));
```
My primary question for the community is whether others have undertaken similar systematic profiling of project loading performance, particularly for projects exceeding a few hundred assets. I am keen to compare observed latency distributions and, more importantly, to discuss any discovered mitigation strategies.
Specific technical details of interest include:
* Observed correlation between project size (asset count, total timeline length) and load time. Is it linear, polynomial, or something else?
* The impact of browser caching for repeated loads of the same project. Are there cache invalidation patterns causing redundant network fetches?
* Any detectable client-side JavaScript execution bottlenecks, such as long-running tasks during the parsing phase, which could be mitigated via web workers or different data structuring from the API.
Sharing any raw performance data, even if anecdotal, would be valuable. For reference, our current baseline for a project with ~300 assets is a median time-to-interactive of approximately 12.7 seconds on a high-speed connection, with a long tail extending beyond 20 seconds. This is the latency we are aiming to deconstruct and reduce.