Efficiently Update Individual List Items in a Real-Time Flutter Stock Market App Without Rebuilding the Entire List

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I am building a stock market app in Flutter that displays a list of stocks, each with attributes like price, today’s change percentage, etc. The app needs to handle frequent updates (e.g., via WebSocket) to individual stock data without unnecessarily rebuilding other tiles in the list. Performance and memory efficiency are key considerations.

Requirements:

  1. Efficient Updates: When a stock’s price or change percentage is updated, only the corresponding tile in the ListView should rebuild.
  2. No Full List Rebuilds: Other list items should not be affected or rebuilt when one tile updates.
  3. Frequent Updates: The backend pushes stock updates frequently, so the solution must scale well with real-time data.
  4. Minimal Memory Overheads: Avoid solutions that lead to memory leaks or excessive resource usage.

What I’ve Tried:

  1. Using a ListView.builder for rendering the list.
  2. Keeping each tile as a StatefulWidget and using setState for updates. However, this approach seems inefficient for frequent updates.
  3. Exploring StreamBuilder and ValueNotifier for individual tiles.

Questions:

  1. What is the best approach to update a single tile in a real-time ListView without rebuilding others?
  2. Are there any patterns, architectures, or state management solutions (like Riverpod, Provider, or Bloc) recommended for this specific use case?
  3. How can I ensure that frequent updates do not introduce memory leaks or performance bottlenecks?
2

I don’t see you talking about Key objects. Did you include that, or do you need further information? Key class - foundation library - Dart API

3

For similar situations, my use of RiverPod as the state manager pays off, see an article that explains this at https://itnext.io/write-best-performance-listviews-with-riverpod-in-flutter-8bf6590ed8b8

4

Please see my blog post on using proxy objects which can solve your problem very elegantly

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