# Why Is My App Slow or Frozen?

> When an app freezes or slows down — heavy tasks, RAM, and indexes — and how to fix it.

Source: https://llamapress.ai/wiki/app-performance-and-speed | Updated: 2026-07-31

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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](mailto: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](https://llamapress.ai/wiki/common-errors-and-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](https://llamapress.ai/wiki/leo-tools-and-features#chat-toolbar) bug button so Leo sees exactly what failed).

## If you're not sure

Email [support@llamapress.ai](mailto: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.