Is it possible to choose Observable library version?

Dear Observable team,

It is good to have this new feature https://talk.observablehq.com/t/infinite-loops-and-you/2740 as it was quite annoying before when the notebooks in other tabs got affected!

However, I found ever since 16 Jan, several of our team notebooks has become extremely slow during reloading. For example, when refreshing the page it took 2 minutes before it completed loading. Mouse movement was almost totally not possible during these 2 minutes. Switching to a different data set in the same notebook (which triggers cells to react) also took more than half 1 minute. When i was about to edit a cell, clicking on the cell code resulted in a noticeable 1-2 seconds before the mouse cursor appeared.

Compared to Observable before 16 Jan, there was no above issues and it was much smoother and there was no noticeable delay. Some of our team notebooks have already run for few months w/o this performance issue.

Is there a chance to choose which Observable library version to use. It was really annoying, and I am choosing between either rewriting the notebook or switching to other platforms, which is not expected.

I will try to provide a share version of the notebook for reproducing this issue, but it may take some time…

Thank you

Hi @Kun-Ting.

Sorry you’re notebooks are slow to load! Would you be willing to privately send us a link to a shared notebook that demonstrates the problem so we can investigate? You can email us at support at observablehq (or direct message me in this forum).

We don’t think this is related to any of our recent changes, but browsers release new versions frequently, and we’ll be able to know more if we can reproduce the problem.

Hi @mbostock,

Thank you for your reply. This issue has been resolved just now after performing a Windows system update. I verified all the affected notebooks the cells rerun immediately on changes and reloading.

To sum up, all the reported slowness issues happened between 16 Jan and 17 Jan. I tried rolling back to earlier stable version from “notebook history”, running the latest Chrome and Firefox browsers, rebooting of PC, and so on.

We will share the notebook to support reproducing this issue in future if it recurs.

Thank you again!

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