Are "Models" less performant than "SQL Queries"?

Context

  • We use Metabase Free Version
  • I have a dashboard with 5 tiles and all 5 tiles are built on one single Model, each performing very simple WHERE + GROUP BY operations
  • The Model is connected to a table in Snowflake and it has <400 rows and 70 columns

Issue
This is the only dashboard that takes more than 1 minute to load and it has such simple calculations to do. Each tile shows the following message until it loads the data:
"Still Waiting…
This is usually pretty fast but seems to be taking a while right now."

Question
Are tiles built on "Models" less performant than "SQL Queries"?

What I tried to do

  • I looked at Snowflake queries and all 5 run in less than 0.5 seconds. No issue.
  • I looked at the metrics of the kubernetes pod and rds database. No issue.
  • I looked at the log of Metabase. No issue.
{
  "browser-info": {
    "language": "en-GB",
    "platform": "MacIntel",
    "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/124.0.0.0 Safari/537.36",
    "vendor": "Google Inc."
  },
  "system-info": {
    "file.encoding": "UTF-8",
    "java.runtime.name": "OpenJDK Runtime Environment",
    "java.runtime.version": "11.0.21+9",
    "java.vendor": "Eclipse Adoptium",
    "java.vendor.url": "https://adoptium.net/",
    "java.version": "11.0.21",
    "java.vm.name": "OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM",
    "java.vm.version": "11.0.21+9",
    "os.name": "Linux",
    "os.version": "5.10.209-198.812.amzn2.x86_64",
    "user.language": "en",
    "user.timezone": "GMT"
  },
  "metabase-info": {
    "databases": [
      "h2",
      "snowflake"
    ],
    "hosting-env": "unknown",
    "application-database": "postgres",
    "application-database-details": {
      "database": {
        "name": "PostgreSQL",
        "version": "14.7"
      },
      "jdbc-driver": {
        "name": "PostgreSQL JDBC Driver",
        "version": "42.6.0"
      }
    },
    "run-mode": "prod",
    "version": {
      "date": "2024-01-11",
      "tag": "v0.48.3",
      "hash": "80d8323"
    },
    "settings": {
      "report-timezone": null
    }
  }
}

Does the issue still persist in latest version of Metabase?