Best Practices for Persisting Loro Documents

The simplest approach is to use full snapshots for both import and export operations. Here's how it works:

1. Import the entire snapshot when loading the document.
2. Export a complete snapshot when saving changes.
3. Implement a debounce or throttle mechanism to trigger snapshot saves after a certain number of edits.

This method simplifies initial application development but has a drawback: user edits are not immediately saved. Let's explore how to quickly save each user edit while minimizing resource consumption.

Balancing Quick Saves and Resource Efficiency

To achieve both quick saves and resource efficiency:

• Use Snapshot Encoding to periodically store the entire document.
• Use Updates Encoding to export delta updates frequently (e.g., after each keystroke or with debounce/throttle). Store these binary data in fast-write storage like user disks or a key-value database. This ensures quick saves with low resource cost.
• When loading a document, import the snapshot and all related updates to get the latest version.
• After importing, export a new snapshot to replace the old one and remove imported updates for faster future loading.
• If your LoroDoc has grown large and older history can be safely recycled, use Shallow Snapshot Encoding to reduce snapshot size. You can archive the history before the shallow snapshot's start version in cold storage.

For collaboration, the binary data generated by snapshot/updates can be transmitted through any medium, such as WebRTC, WebSocket, or HTTP.

The strong eventual consistency in CRDTs ensures that peers with identical sets of operations will converge to the same document state, obviating concerns about the order, duplication, or timing of operation delivery.