Best practices for handling large repeat groups in KoboCollect — performance tips?

User Support Form Building
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1

I’m working on a survey with several nested repeat groups (household → individual → asset-level questions) and starting to notice slowdowns when the form gets large, especially on lower-end Android devices used by our field enumerators.

A few things I’m trying to figure out:

  • Does breaking repeat groups into separate forms linked via case IDs actually help performance, or is it just a workaround?
  • Any recommended limits on the number of nested repeat levels before KoboCollect starts struggling?
  • Has anyone compared performance between the older XLSForm-based repeats vs. newer dynamic select approaches?
  • Tips for optimizing choice lists (cascading selects) when they’re pulling from large external CSVs?

Would love to hear how others handle large-scale household surveys without sacrificing app responsiveness in the field. Any XLSForm structuring tips or real-world experience would be super helpful.

2

Welcome to the community, @timdavid123432! The form performance basically depends on the total number of questions and choices that you have there. Basically the form starts performing slowly if the total number of questions and choices are large. To manage this, you could either break your forms into multiple forms to manage the list of large questions. And to manage the large number of choices, you could always use external CSV files.