Large views load faster with previews - IN INTERFACES

My personal take on this matter is that previews should be optional at a workspace or base level! There are multiple posts on the community complaining about not being able to see all records at once, and the solution/answer is usually “work from interfaces, where you do not have previews”. If they move forward with default previews then this would be an issue!

Either way, you might want to submit this product idea form!

https://community.airtable.com/p/product-ideas

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation 
YouTube Channel 

Yeah: the new preview thing has been an absolute disaster for my clients.

It just randomly decides to remove random records from the list with no logic nor reason as to which records are being removed.

Even worse, if you’re grouping your records into separate groups, Airtable will just randomly remove a handful of records from each group — so you don’t even realize that your totals for that group are completely wrong.

My clients had no problem with waiting a few extra seconds for their bases to load into their web browser, so I wish Airtable gave us the ability to turn this off.

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant 

You’re right the “large views load faster” improvement doesn’t fully carry over to Interfaces, and this becomes very noticeable past ~20–30k records.

What’s happening

Interfaces often try to load more linked/related data + UI elements, so they don’t benefit as much from the view-level optimizations.

Practical ways to improve performance

1. Reduce records at the source

• Use filtered views as the interface source
• Don’t connect interfaces directly to full 25k+ tables

2. Break interfaces into smaller views

• Split by status, team, or project
• Avoid one “all records” interface

3. Limit heavy fields

• Reduce lookups, rollups, and linked records shown
• These slow down interface rendering a lot

4. Use “record picker” patterns

• Let users search/select a record first
• Then load details → instead of loading everything upfront

Bottom line: Interfaces aren’t optimized for large datasets yet best approach is to limit what gets loaded, not just rely on Airtable’s backend improvements.