Does big object increase VF page performance?

Question

I ran into the issue, due to the huge amount of the data my VF page performance is very slow, I have already had index filer in my regular objects and still, the result is same.

I read about big objects and it says in of the use case.

"Historical archive — Maintain access to historical data for analysis or compliance purposes while optimizing the performance of your core CRM or Force.com applications."

Looking at the standard SOQL query which can extract the data from big objects but will big object can increase the performance?

How does this behave differently from the regular custom object in term of Performance?

Answer 1

The intent of Big Objects is not to be used as Transactional data. They are more intended towards holding very large data volumes. This excerpt below from trailhead explains it the best way:

Big objects allow you to store and manage a massive amount of data on the Salesforce platform. How massive, you ask?

A thousand records? No, think bigger.

A hundred thousand? Bigger!

A million? Not even close!

Big objects provide consistent performance for a billion records or more

Also Big Objects do not support full SOQL commands, but only a subset of it.

You can query big objects using a subset of standard SOQL commands

Futhermore, if you look the same trailhead, it mentions:

To support the scale of data in a big object, you can’t use triggers, flows, processes, and the Salesforce app.

So that kind of summarizes that Big Objects are not to be used anything else than they are intended for.

You definitely should not be looking to consider Big Object for sake of VF performance considering what they are intended for and that what VF page is capable of, there's definitely no real connection here.

A VF performance has much more than data, it's how you design it. And there are resources for improving VF performance, which you can always refer to. You should look towards Query Plan tool to review any queries that you may be using on your VF and improve performance there as well.

Answer 2

A big data object isn't going to solve your problem. Big data is stored differently than data in a regular sObject. It will likely be even more difficult to pull out from a query exactly what it is that you need.

From your description, the problem you're having is the information you're retrieving doesn't rely on fields that are indexed. If you need to further improve performance, ask Salesforce to create a "skinny" table for you. Also, if you haven't already, spend time in the Developer Console with the query optimizer to better understand why your database query is so slow. Do the same with profiling your code to see where your actual execution time is being spent.