Question How many is too many?

So I'm pulling json data from firebase and then pushing this data to prefabs, like user messages and then these are then set active in the scroll view. I'd like to use object pooling but with how unitys scroll rect doesn't react well in my experience, I was wondering how many UI prefabs could I instantiate instead without it being a processing issue... I don't expect there to be more than 100-500 objects being pulled at a time.

 

double or triple the amount you can fit on the screen, and that's a rough ballpark of how many objects you want to have active in the scene. certainly not in the hundreds.

 

Pooling*. Grammar police need not reply...

 

As it is now with my current pool, it has 100 message objects active at once. That doesn't seem to be an issue. I haven't tried to instantiate 100 message prefabs yet but I'd assume it'd work. But if it were to be 500 message prefabs, then maybe it would start to lag

 

And you have low end testing devices? You know, the only way to know what is too much is to test it on the actual hardware it's supposed to run. If you have only high end testing devices your results may be skewed heavily.

 

I’ve found loading too many UI elements can make it lag a bit on loading as you mentioned. In our case we had over a hundred achievements and it created a noticeable delay on some mobile devices.

Options:

• Paging
• Don’t create all records at once e.g. maybe instantiate one per update call. Unfortunately this doesn’t look good as you can see the list expanding.
• I found the layout elements can be a bit slow and normally manually place the items instead.
• Having another canvas for the elements can also help.
• If each record is the same height then I’d recommend recycling the elements like the UIToolkit ListView. So if you have 1000 records but can only see 10 at once then just create 10 and update the position and rebind the data while scrolling.