Last month a friend asked me to help debug a 3D model gallery he was building. Beautiful idea: a scrollable showcase of about fifty detailed meshes, all rendered with React Three Fiber . The problem? It looked like a slideshow on a Pentium 3. His MacBook Pro was wheezing. My M2 was hitting 8 FPS once everything mounted. I've shipped a handful of WebGL-heavy apps over the years, and this is by far the most common failure mode I see in React Three Fiber projects. The fix is almost always the same set of moves — but you have to actually identify which one your scene is choking on. The symptoms Here's what you usually notice, in order: Page loads fine, hits 60 FPS with one model. Add more models. FPS starts crawling. Browser GPU process eats 2+ GB of RAM. Hot reload makes it worse every time. After 5 minutes, the tab crashes with WebGL context lost . If any of that sounds familiar, you're almost certainly hitting one of three issues: too many draw calls, leaked GPU resources, or both at once.…