Last month a friend asked me to help debug a 3D model gallery he was building. Beautiful idea: a scrollable showcase of about fifty detailed meshes, all rendered with React Three Fiber . The problem? It looked like a slideshow on a Pentium 3.

His MacBook Pro was wheezing. My M2 was hitting 8 FPS once everything mounted. I've shipped a handful of WebGL-heavy apps over the years, and this is by far the most common failure mode I see in React Three Fiber projects. The fix is almost always the same set of moves — but you have to actually identify which one your scene is choking on.

The symptoms

Here's what you usually notice, in order:

Page loads fine, hits 60 FPS with one model.

Add more models.…