Rendering limits
Everything has a limit somewhere, and it is better to know where before you hit it in front of an audience. These are the ones worth planning around.
Most people never meet any of them. Generated diagrams, very large graphs and TikZ figures are where they show up.
#When you need this page
A diagram that renders locally but not on the page.
Generated diagrams from tooling, which can be enormous.
Planning what logged-out readers will see on a public page.
#The detail
Field | What it does |
|---|---|
Source size | Very large sources are rejected rather than rendered slowly. Filter generated graphs before pasting. |
Render time | Long renders time out. TikZ and very large Graphviz graphs are the usual causes. |
Browser-rendered languages | draw.io and Excalidraw need a browser, so anonymous readers get a stored image. |
Stored previews | Indexing attaches a rendered preview, which is what makes offline and export views work. |
Indexing delay | A new diagram takes a few minutes to appear in search and template pickers. |
#What an anonymous reader sees
Diagram | Anonymous view |
|---|---|
Text languages | The stored preview, rendered when the diagram was saved |
draw.io and Excalidraw | The stored preview image |
A diagram saved seconds ago | Possibly nothing yet, until the preview is written |
A restricted page | Nothing, as with any restricted content |
#A few things that catch people out
A diagram nobody can read is past a more important limit than any of these. Split it.
Anonymous readers never get an API token, so anything needing a live render falls back to the stored preview.
What logged-out readers see is covered properly in Security and privacy.
#Related
The page you only need when something is odd.
