The new realtime data storage engine and its benefits

Since v3.14, rooms can be powered by our new v2 realtime data storage engine—a ground-up rearchitecture that removes server-side memory limits, enabling faster initial loads and support for much larger documents. Switching is seamless and requires no code changes. Rooms on v1 or v2 behave identically from your app’s perspective—the two sync engines we support—Liveblocks Storage and Yjs all work the same way.

Since March 10, 2026, the v2 engine is the default for all newly created rooms. Existing rooms remain on v1 for now.

What are the benefits?

The main architectural leap of v2 is that the Liveblocks server no longer needs to keep the entire document in memory. In v1, large documents put memory pressure on our edge workers, which are limited in capacity. A 50 MiB document, including its overhead, could easily cause an OOM crash in an edge worker on the v1 engine, in turn causing the room to become inaccessible.

Rooms on the v2 realtime data storage engine now stream their document data directly from our persisted storage layer, keeping only minimal data in memory. Conflict resolution and mutations happen directly in the storage layer too.

This enables arbitrarily large documents—server memory is no longer the bottleneck (browser memory, network speed, or your app’s rendering performance might now be).

Initial load time will be faster, especially for larger documents: the server can start streaming immediately without buffering, and our wire protocol has been compacted to reduce transmission overhead.

Several previously documented platform limits have been raised significantly for rooms on the v2 engine:

How it works

The engine version is assigned at room creation time and cannot be changed afterward. Since March 10, 2026, all newly created rooms automatically use the v2 engine. No opt-in or code changes are required.

If you're on an older SDK version, we recommend upgrading to v3.14+ to take full advantage of the v2 engine: npx liveblocks@latest upgrade

Migrating existing rooms

Existing rooms that were created before this change remain on the v1 engine. Eventually, we will transparently migrate all existing room data from the v1 to the v2 engine. This process will be seamless and require no action on your part. We will announce this ahead of time.