Recently, many people have been asking me: why does your on-chain data keep "freezing" occasionally, even though the browser can still load it smoothly? To be honest, it's probably not your internet connection being bad, but rather the indexer/Subgraph hasn't finished processing the new blocks, or RPC is being rate-limited and queued. Especially when you're running scripts to scan events while also trying to refresh in real-time, nodes tend to see this request pattern and easily return a 429 error, causing the frontend to pretend it's "loading."

So, whose fault is it?
Most of the time, it's because you take "real-time" for granted.

Now there are a bunch of AI Agents and automated trading on the chain running wild... The narrative is hyped up, but underneath, request storms and security details are ignored, and in the end, everyone is congesting the same RPC, making everything slow. My approach is pretty simple: don't rely on a single Subgraph for the critical path, use multiple sources, fallback to direct RPC reads for the least data, and prefer fewer tricks—just ensure stability first.