What contributes to workload?

This section covers how different activity types contribute to your app's total workload

Workload, in essence, measures the work that Bubble performs to power your application. As your app processes actions such as loading a page or , it contributes to your monthly workload consumption.

We track a total of 12 different activity types that each contribute to the total workload of the current month. We track the total work that occurs during each month, and reset the count at the beginning of each new month. Since every app is unique, this approach ensures a use-case agnostic way that lets you scale your app based on actual consumption.

Each of the activity types below contribute to your app’s total monthly workload. You can gain deeper insight into some of these metrics by exploring your app's workload charts and identify the areas of your app that are doing the most work and take steps to optimize their performance.

Activity types

Each of the activity types and how they can be explored in the App Metrics dashboard is listed in the table below. Click each activity type to learn more about it.

Activity type	App Metrics drill-down
	Click to view list of Workflows, click workflow name to go to that workflow in the workflow tab
	Click to view list of Workflows, click workflow name to go to that workflow in the workflow tab
	Click to view list of Workflows, click workflow name to go to that workflow in the workflow tab
	Click to view list of Workflows, click workflow name to go to that workflow in the workflow tab
	No drill-down
	Click to view list of Pages, click page name will take you to that page
	Click to view the list of API calls, prefixed by Workflow and Data.
	Click to view list of API names: : name of the API Workflow : name of the data type
	No drill-down
	Click to view names of CSV Files
	No drill-down
Fetching Data
∟	Click to view list of searches, clicking will take you to expression in editor
∟	Click to view list of searches, clicking will take you to expression in editor
∟	No drill-down
∟	Click to view list of searches, clicking will take you to expression in editor
∟	Click to view list of searches, clicking will take you to expression in editor
∟	Click to view list of searches, clicking will take you to expression in editor

What does an activity cost in WU?

Server processing versus client-side processing

Workload incurs for work that happens on the Bubble server. This is often, but not exclusively, related to database operations. As such, operations that happen client-side (on the user's device) without having to communicate with the server, do not incur workload.

Keep in mind that a client-side action (such as show/hide an element) happens on the client, but may still incur a cost if you involve the server in another way. For example, if the show/hide action contains a condition that checks something on the server, that dynamic expression will incur a cost.

If you are looking into optimizing your app for workload, it's important to understand the difference between server-side and client-side operations. The articles below

• Article: Client-side and server-side This article covers the difference between the work that happens on the server, and what happens on the user's device (the client).

• Article: The frontend and backend This article covers the difference in operations that are triggered by your users from the frontend (your app), and operations that are triggered and performed 100% on the server (such as inbound API calls).

The below table represents the cost of the raw ingredients for an action. In other words, the ultimate cost of an action can be different than the table indicates, depending on what that activity does. For example, performing a database search has the base cost reflected in the table, but that cost can vary depending on the complexity of the search and the amount of data to search through and return.

As a result, if the actual workload consumption doesn't match your expectations, we recommend using your app metrics to isolate the activities that consume the most workload and look at ways to make it more efficient.

Checking specific workload units consumed in the logs

Using the Server logs tab, you can check the workload charged for each action, as well as the total for each workflow.

Drilling down using the App metrics dashboard

In many cases, workload consumption can be isolated to a select few of your app’s processes that are either workload-intensive or triggered frequently. To help you identify what pages and activities in your app are consuming the most workload, you can use the App Metrics dashboard to get an overview.

The App metrics dashboard gives an overview and a detailed view of your app's workload and what contributes to it.

There, you can see the total aggregated workload usage for the last 30 days, broken down by Development and Live consumption. Both Development and Live contribute to your total usage.

To learn more about how to use app metrics to drill down into your app’s workload activities, check out the article below or try our interactive walk-through:

Article: Using App metrics Interactive walk-through: Exploring Workload Usage

In the same dashboard, you can also see a pie chart visualization of which activities contributed the most to workflow usage in the selected period. You can use the bar chart to select the time period to include in the pie chart visualization. By clicking on a sector in the pie chart, you can drill down to see where in your app this is occurring, down to individual pages, workflows, elements and expressions.