Why Is My App Slow or Frozen?
Heavy tasks, memory, and data — and how to make your app fast again.
If your app suddenly freezes or crawls — especially during a specific action like generating a PDF or loading a big list — it's usually not "broken." It's hitting a resource limit. The good news: this is almost always fixable, either by optimizing the work or by giving your app more power.
The usual culprits
1. A heavy task is using too much memory
Operations like generating PDFs, processing images, or building large exports can spike memory usage. On a smaller instance, one heavy task can use up all the available RAM and lock up the whole app for everyone until it recovers.
- Quick fix: ask us to upgrade your instance's RAM (for example from 2GB to 4GB). If heavy tasks are a regular part of your workflow, this is the single biggest improvement. Email support@llamapress.ai.
- Also worth doing: ask Leo to make the heavy task more efficient — e.g. generate documents from already-loaded data instead of re-querying, or process in smaller batches.
2. Your data isn't indexed
As your tables grow, looking things up without a database index gets slow. If a particular page or search has gotten sluggish, ask Leo to add an index for the columns you filter or sort by.
Tip: if you filter by several fields together (say product, width, and height), ask Leo for a single composite index on all of them together, rather than separate indexes on each — that makes the biggest difference for combined lookups.
3. The app needs a restart
Sometimes "frozen" just means the web server got stuck and needs a restart — see Common Errors & Fixes (502 / "Puma needs a restart"). A hard refresh and a couple of minutes often clears it; if not, email us.
Telling a freeze apart from a bug
- Resource issue — the app works normally until one heavy action, then everything hangs or times out. → optimize the task and/or upgrade RAM.
- Code bug — a specific page errors or behaves wrong every time, regardless of load. → ask Leo to fix it (use the Capture Logs bug button so Leo sees exactly what failed).
If you're not sure
Email support@llamapress.ai with your app name and what action makes it slow. We can look at the instance's memory and logs and tell you whether it's a resource upgrade, an optimization, or a bug to hand to Leo.