Insomnia: [Performance] Insomnia is laggy when working with large request body strings

[Zero3]

• Insomnia Version: 5.14.8
• Operating System: Reproducible on Windows 7 and Windows 10

When working with large strings in request bodies, the request body editor in Insomnia becomes very laggy. These are some of the operations that all take multiple seconds to execute:

• Pasting a string
• Deleting any character in the string
• Selecting all request body with CTRL + A

The lag is clearly visible with a single ~100 KB strings. Using a single ~1 MB string, it is pretty unbearable, with every operation mentioned above taking multiple seconds to execute.

[gschier]

I was able to reproduce the "Select All" issue with a larger 4.5MB string but couldn't see any lag when deleting characters. Can you provide a sample string for testing purposes?

[mattjbrent]

I'm working with requests that return base64 strings currently and i'm experiencing this issue. It can take several seconds to display the text and editing it can be intermitently choppy.

Insomnia 5.14.9.1895
OSX High Sierra
MacBook Pro 2016

Im working with an API where I can receive incrementally large base64 strings so when I have time i'll make some requests and try log some times/actions on these strings

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[Zero3]

Hey stalebot!

It's quite annoying that you keep closing my issues. I invested time in reporting them, and if they just get closed automatically when your owner don't fix them fast enough, I might be disencouraged from submitting new issues in the future. Maybe your owner doesn't want to encourage people to submit issues in the first place, of course... But that would be sad, wouldn't it? You would think that it would be appreciated. Either way, your disencouragement is working, because I'm quite annoyed with you by now :(.

(cc @gschier)

[gschier]

Sorry @Zero3! @stalebot works well for things like feature request but, I agree, can be annoying for bugs and issues like this that should be resolved.

[Zero3]

Thanks for reopening.

Regarding the issue at hand: Like Matt, I also noticed this issue when calling an endpoint that returned Base64 data. In my case, it was in a string field of a JSON object.

[hapablap21]

I'm having the same issue with request bodies that are large, regardless of encoding. Just ctrl-A on a big JSON blob inside the request window and insomnia freezes completely. In my usage, this is new since v6.0.2.

[rubin55]

I'm having this issue also: large request body slows things to a crawl. I suspect this has to do with the syntax highlighting? Is it possible to turn syntax highlighting off? In this case I'm working on an XML body, but I see exactly the same behaviour with larger JSON bodies. Wrapping long lines on/off seems to have no effect on the issue.

[gschier]

As a workaround for now, if you do not need to edit the JSON, it might be possible to attach the JSON as a file instead?

@rubin55 to test if it's the syntax highlighting, can you change the body type to "Other" and see if the problem continues? Also, as another experiment, can you turn on "Nunjucks power user mode" in the main app settings?

[rubin55]

Hi @gschier; when I change the body type from XML to Other, syntax coloring remains in effect. Thus I'm not sure that in that case I'm actually turning off something that could slow things down in this case. My test file is a 10000 line soap request body for a POST.

[gschier]

Ah yes, you'll need to also remove the Content-Type header too I think

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[eamigo86]

Please do not close this issue that still occurs:

Steps to reproduce:

• Bodies with big data structures (JSON or XML) or base64 strings

Tested too storing the base64 string in an Insomnia's environment variable

• Insomnia Version: 2020.3.3
• Operating System: MacOS Catalina 10.15.6
• Hardware Specs: i7-8750H + 32GB RAM + SSD 1TB

[mattjbrent]

I've since moved onto using Postman as this issue was a deal breaker for me. Still an issue 2 years later and is now closed out.