Short YouTube video (May 18, 2025) by Dennis H. Lewis explaining that Bubble workflows do not reliably execute strictly top-to-bottom; instead, once triggered Bubble may attempt to run many steps concurrently, causing intermittent bugs and race conditions that become more apparent under load. The clip includes a second speaker agreeing that the visual design (top-to-bottom sequence) misleads developers about execution order.
Chapters
I did a video not too long about synchronicity and a lot of the bugs people have in their applications are due to the fact that they don't really understand how workflows execute. They don't go in order just because it's, you know, used to be left to. Right now it's down to, you know, top to bottom, and they look like they're steps that go consecutively. That's not how Bubble works. It will, once it starts and works well, try to do every step at the same time.
It's confusing because from a design standpoint, when you're looking at that sequence of things that are supposedly happening in order, it is confusing. I can see how someone would think, oh, I have this very. This first step at the very top, so that's going to happen first. And then as things.
Go and then it doesn't. It doesn't. Or it does at sometimes and it doesn't at other times. Because you could be, you know, things may. When there's not any demand on the application, it may not really happen and you may not notice. And then when there's a lot of people trying to access your application, things go slower and those synchronicity issues become more important.
It's not a problem that can't be fixed. Bubble has the tools inside it to make sure that that doesn't happen. You just have to know how to use them.