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We are pleased to announce significant improvements to AppSheet sync performance. We’ve reduced sync times by 20% to 30% or even more in some cases.
Over the last few years, in addition to improvements like the recently announced Quick Sync, we’ve been making investments in improving and modernizing our backend service. This has resulted in a new backend that is faster and more efficient. We’ve been shifting parts of AppSheet to the new backend gradually to ensure we do not disrupt ongoing usage across the product. Recently, we shifted traffic for sync, and we’ve seen exciting performance improvements we’d like to share with the community.
During peak traffic times, we’ve seen a reduction of more than 30% in sync times at the 95th percentile. The top 5% of the slowest app syncs took less than 70% as long to complete. Here’s a graph comparing sync times at the 95th percentile over 2 days.
Notice that the differences between the old and new are greatest at the times when peak load caused the old backend to slow down whereas the new backend handled the traffic gracefully. Even for syncs not in the 95th percentile, we are seeing an over 20% improvement in sync times.
What do I need to do to enable this feature?
Nothing, this change is rolled out to all users already. If you haven’t already, you should consider enabling Quick Sync for your existing apps. More information on improving the sync performance of your apps can be found here.
We hope you are all as excited as we are as we reap the fruits of our investments in the AppSheet service. We will continue updating you in the future about additional improvements in the user experience and performance of AppSheet.
Thank you!
The AppSheet infrastructure team
I don't know if these changes affect to our app or not, however we increasingly encountered time out errors recently, nearly happened to all users, so we must wait for a long time for synchronization to complete
Could someone give me soluiton for this solution, thank you!
p/s: our app use Google Sheets as main source
must of my problem is when i use a BOT. do you use too a bot? The strange things is if you look this same event have so different result. One take 1517 second and the same later only 4second.
@hugheshilton wrote:
This update wouldn't really affect the difference in performance between Sheets and Databases.
I've noticed that when I use the same app with identical data, and I copy it to a database (Supabase) using the core plan, it loads much faster than when I use Google Sheets. However, the speed difference between the database and Google Sheets is quite significant. Is there a specific reason for this? Does the current upgrade only improve speed when a database is used and not with Google Sheets? I've observed a notable increase in speed when using a degree of parallelism set to '3' with the AppSheet core plan. I'm hopeful that with a degree of parallelism set to '10', as in the enterprise plan, the sync speed can be reduced to nearly 1 second from the previous 3 seconds. Can you please confirm whether this update actually affects the performance of Google Sheets as a database?
Here is the comparison:
On average, this is at least four times faster than Google Sheets. 🤔 @hugheshilton
Hello @Stefan_QREW
I've created a significantly large application, putting in my utmost effort to minimize the use of virtual columns. Instead, I've employed a combination of slice and dashboard views to effectively depict related rows without excessive computational overhead. The app typically loads within 10 seconds, which is quite satisfactory considering the number of tables and views in use. Here are the statistics for my tables in Google Sheets. (Still under development)
Regarding the improvements mentioned in the post, it appears that the 30% reduction in sync time has a significant impact and is well-optimized for the database and not google sheets.
@Stefan_QREW wrote:
In my experience, AppSheet apps will never consistently sync below 2 sec. My goal for sync time with any app is to get it in the 3-5 sec range. Trying to get anything lower than that gives diminishing returns on development efforts.
As you're aware, the Degree of Parallelism for the Enterprise plan is set at '10,' which is approximately three times that of the Core plan. If the database can currently load in less than 3 seconds, would this mean that with the Enterprise plan, it would be around 1 second to load the app? I'm curious about this, as it could be a compelling point to present to my client in favor of upgrading to the Enterprise plan.
@Stefan_QREW wrote:
If you have a database attached to your app, turning on Delta Sync and Quick Sync are going to give you the best Syncing Experience.
The performance is outstanding when compared to Google Sheets, which leads me to consider whether, over the course of a couple of months as the data in the sheet increases, this could potentially impact the synchronization performance.
Another notable improvement I observed is the speed at which it takes to edit a row, which is just 0.25 seconds, whereas Google Sheets takes approximately 1 second for the same task. This efficiency becomes particularly evident when carrying out looping actions and automations, as the database consistently demonstrates a performance that is 3 times faster than Google Sheets.
@fanfan @Stefan_QREW Everything makes sense now, and I appreciate your clear explanation. Thank you!
Here's another issue related to the update action, involving a simple action in two different scenarios. Due to this, the synchronization process takes a significant amount of time to complete. While it's understandable that syncing can take time, does the writing process also impact the overall size of the app?
