Performance Issue: Loading All Fields Causes Slowdowns with Large Number of Fields

[gddotorg]

Describe the bug

We’re experiencing a significant performance issue when doing calls to our headless Craft CMS setup. I looked a bit closer and the performance issue caused by the loading of our around 2100 Formie fields every time we fire a call.

I traced the performance bottleneck to the SubmissionQuery class — specifically in the fieldLayouts method when the following line is called:

$layoutFields[] = Formie::$plugin->getFields()->getAllFields();

Inside the getAllFields() function, the most expensive operation occurs during field creation. The loop at line 267 builds all field instances, and the critical part is at line 550:

$fields[] = Formie::$plugin->getFields()->createField($fieldRecord);

This loop appears to instantiate every single field, which becomes very costly when thousands of fields exist. Also it happens all the time when Craft CMS is initializing. So you can see it when working in the backend.

My colleague told me he had a similar issue. Maybe that helps: craftcms/cms#13992

Steps to reproduce

1. Having 2100 formie fields
2. Run any backend action
3. See the delay in the debugger tool under "Timeline"

Form settings

• Multi-page form: No
• Submission Method: Ajax
• Client-side Validation: Yes
• Custom Form Templates: No

Craft CMS version

5.8.19

Plugin version

3.1.5

Multi-site?

No

Additional context

[engram-design]

I'll see what I can do here about that. Craft's GQL handling is a little odd in that it does indeed need to prep a lot of things in order to generate a schema, which does mean at times calling things about Formie forms/fields/etc even when you're not calling anything to do with that data.

Out of interest, is it an issue of the initial call to GQL, or using a particular query, or any query at all?

[gddotorg]

@engram-design Thanks for your quick reply. We use our own REST API (Custom Controller Action and Routing). I also noticed that regardless of what we call, this formie code is always running. So even when I log into the control panel and navigate around in the backend.