The app is happy on modest hardware, but a few practices keep large boards and long renders fast.
Large boards
A board with hundreds of high-resolution images can slow pan / zoom. Fixes:
- Smart Grouping → By type to clean up the layout.
- Group reference frames — collapse a frame to a thumbnail when not in use.
- Move old material to sub-boards — keeps the active board light.
- Reduce zoom range — extreme zoom-out forces the renderer to draw every element.
Video previews
Many video thumbnails on the canvas force the browser to decode many video tracks. Tips:
- The app auto-pauses videos that are off-screen; if they keep playing, refresh the canvas (toggle a different view and back).
- Lower-resolution proxies are generated automatically for canvas thumbnails. If you imported a 4K source, the proxy is what plays on the canvas, not the original.
GPU
The render engine uses Playwright (Chromium) which can use the GPU when available. On Macs the GPU is used automatically; on Windows, ensure the system’s preferred GPU is set to the discrete GPU for the GreenLight DashBoard process.
Concurrent renders
By default the render worker runs one project at a time. For self-hosted deployments with spare CPU, raise the cap:
RENDER_CONCURRENCY=2In backend/.env. Two concurrent renders on an 8-core machine is usually safe; more than that contends with the rest of the system.
Long videos
For videos over 10 minutes, ensure your media-serving setup supports byte-range requests — otherwise scrubbing breaks.
Memory
The bundled Chromium for renders can use 1–2 GB peak. Closing other heavy apps during a long render helps.
Backup before heavy work
Before a long Smart Grouping operation, batch generation, or import of hundreds of files, a snapshot of the data folder takes a few seconds and saves headache if something goes wrong.
Disk space
The board folder grows fast with video and AI generation. Periodically:
- Right-click → Reveal in Finder on the Media Library and prune unused files.
- Delete the Auto-update cache folder (
auto-update-cache/) — it stores old installers. - Delete the share-cache folder — it stores cached upload deltas; the next share republish refreshes it.
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