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CSS Animations Impacting Performance in a Large React Application

👀 Views: 76 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-09-06
css react performance animations

I'm confused about I tried several approaches but none seem to work... I've looked through the documentation and I'm still confused about Currently developing a large-scale application in React, I've noticed that the CSS animations are causing significant performance bottlenecks, especially on mobile devices. The animations, while enhancing the user experience, lead to noticeable frame drops during transitions, particularly when components are being rendered dynamically. In my codebase, I utilize keyframe animations for a menu dropdown and hover effects on cards: ```css @keyframes slideDown { from { opacity: 0; transform: translateY(-20px); } to { opacity: 1; transform: translateY(0); } } .menu { animation: slideDown 0.5s ease-out; } .card:hover { animation: pulse 0.3s infinite alternate; } ``` Despite these animations being smooth on desktop, mobile performance suffers due to the heavy reflows and repaints caused by these animations when the components are rendered or updated. I've profiled the application using Chrome DevTools, and it indicates that the animation frames lead to considerable layout thrashing, especially in Safari on iOS devices. To address these performance issues, I attempted to switch to CSS transitions on properties like `opacity` and `transform`, as they are supposed to be GPU accelerated. Here's an updated snippet: ```css .card { transition: transform 0.3s ease, opacity 0.3s ease; } .card:hover { transform: scale(1.05); opacity: 0.9; } ``` While this did improve performance a bit, there's still a lag when the menu opens or closes. I even tried using `will-change: transform;` on the menu item, hoping to preemptively optimize the rendering path, but it didn’t yield the expected results. After profiling the application, I found that the main thread is getting blocked, likely due to JavaScript execution during the animations. I suspect that the combination of heavy state updates in React and the CSS animations might be causing this problem. Looking for insights on better practices or alternative strategies to mitigate these performance issues without sacrificing the visual appeal. Has anyone else dealt with similar issues, and what solutions did you find effective? Any recommendations on tools or techniques to diagnose and rectify these bottlenecks would be greatly appreciated. This is part of a larger application I'm building. Any ideas what could be causing this? For context: I'm using Css on macOS. Has anyone else encountered this? My development environment is macOS. Any feedback is welcome! For context: I'm using Css on Windows 10.