Don't Animate Height

The article discusses performance issues encountered while developing the Granola note-taking app, specifically related to CSS animations that were causing high CPU and GPU usage on an M2 MacBook. The author identified that a CSS animation, particularly one involving the height property, was responsible for excessive resource consumption. By using Chrome's developer tools, the author analyzed the rendering process and discovered that the animation triggered frequent layout recalculations, which are costly in terms of performance. To resolve this, the author replaced the height animation with a more efficient transform animation, which significantly reduced CPU and GPU usage. The optimized visualizer now uses only 6% CPU and less than 1% GPU, demonstrating the importance of understanding the browser's rendering pipeline and selecting appropriate CSS properties for animations. The article concludes with a note on future discussions about performance optimization tools.

- CSS animations can significantly impact app performance, especially when animating layout properties like height.

- Using Chrome's developer tools can help identify performance bottlenecks in web applications.

- Transform animations are more efficient than height animations, as they avoid costly layout recalculations.

- Understanding the browser's rendering pipeline is crucial for optimizing web performance.

- The author plans to explore additional performance optimization tools in future posts.