Scalability Concerns with High Volume of Users Generating PDFs Simultaneously through Custom Actions

[Islom]

Hello AppSheet Community,

We are currently facing a potential scalability challenge with our app. As part of our app's functionality, we have created a custom action with automation to generate PDFs. During peak work hours, we anticipate between 100 to 1,000 users could be using this custom action to generate PDFs simultaneously. Given the resource-intensive nature of this operation, we are concerned about potential performance bottlenecks and ensuring a smooth user experience.

1. Has anyone encountered a similar volume of users performing a custom action of this nature on the platform at once? If so, how did the system handle it?

2. Are there any optimizations or strategies that you have implemented in similar scenarios to enhance performance, especially concerning custom actions?

3. We are also mulling over the idea of migrating from our current Google Sheets framework to a more scalable cloud database solution, such as Google Cloud SQL or AWS RDS. Has anyone undertaken such a migration, and can you share your experiences and insights regarding this transition?

Any feedback, recommendations, or experiences you can share will be immensely valuable to us.

Thank you in advance for your time and assistance!

Best regards,
Islom

[WillowMobileSys · Accepted solution]

This is a use case that will likely be problematic in AppSheet.  1000 instances of generating complete PDF documents will take a long while.  AppSheet Support can probably give you better guidance.

Updating to a database will not help with the PDF generation much, if at all.  However, updating to an Enterprise plan, which is required for database usage, WILL help as it will give you more degrees of parallelism for processing of automation.  That may still not be enough.

I do think you should review your need carefully.  For instance, if the 1000 generated PDF's are all the same, or maybe a handful of versions, with only a few fields that differ from user to user, then a fully generated PDF may not be the way to go.  Instead you should look to integrate with a service that allows you to use fillable PDF's.  This would be much more efficient.  It also offloads some of the processing work to an external service.

As far as transitioning to a database, difficulty will depend on how well the Google sheets follow a database structure.  If you have table in non-normal form or have a lot of formulas in your sheets, you may find transitioning to a database is a chore.  On the other hand, if you have followed AppSheet's recommended practice for creating tables and using sheets for your apps, transitioning to a database will be a breeze.