At what point does the number of collections affect performance?

[dave-calleja]

I have a project with many blocks. Since these should be reusable, this could lead to about 300 collections.

I am currently evaluating CMSs and was wondering if performance would start to choke as the number of collections increases.

Thanks.

[AlessioGr]

Admin Panel Performance

There are three main areas that can slow down the Payload Admin Panel as your config grows larger:

• Calculating permissions
• Sending the client config to your browser
• Generating types (which doesn’t happen at runtime)

We’re actively optimizing performance to ensure Payload scales well, even with large configurations.

Blocks specifically

We've shipped Block References just a few days ago to significantly improve performance when you have many blocks. Here's a performance comparison. This feature allows you to define each block only once. Then, whenever you use that block, it doesn’t add any additional overhead for calculating permissions, sending client config, or generating types. You could use the same block in 300 different places, and performance would remain comparable to using it in just one collection - even if you accumulate thousands of referenced blocks.

Admin Panel performance might slow down if you have a lot of collections, globals, or fields that sit outside of your blocks. However, you would need a very large number of them to notice a significant slowdown, and we continue to make improvements in this area. It also depends on the speed of your CPU, so it's hard to say when specifically you notice a slowdown.

API Performance

The amount of collections / globals should barely affect the performance of the payload API, if at all.

The amount of fields in the specific collection that is being queried will affect API performance, as we're deeply iterating fields to handle things like validation / access control / populating relationships.
Blocks specifically will only affect performance if they're being used in the document though. You shouldn't notice any slowdown if you have 500 blocks defined in a blocks field, and only one 2-3 blocks are part of the document data.