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How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown

8.1 relevance
Score Breakdown
technical depth
9
novelty
7
actionability
8
community
9
strategic
6
personal
9

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Deep technical breakdown of performance optimization in a popular tool, highly actionable and relevant.

General performance.dev
How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown
Summary

Linear achieves sub-100ms UI updates by inverting the traditional client-server model: the browser's IndexedDB acts as the primary database, with mutations applied locally to MobX observables before being asynchronously synced via WebSocket. This eliminates network round-trips from the critical rendering path, making spinners and loading states unnecessary. Co-founder Tuomas built the custom sync engine as the first lines of code, prioritizing this architecture from day one.

Author

Dennis Brotzky