App Hardware Performance when editing Definition

I’ve got an App which is hugely complicated, such that a save & verify always takes well over 4mins. Which is a PITA. I’m fully aware of how to reprogram the App to reduce this. But it got me wondering how much of this time is down to the processing capacity of the computer? Since I assume that everything is verified locally rather than in the cloud.

My PC is getting on a bit now and I’d happily buy a new one if it would improve the performance. Especially moving columns in a slice, which causes the PC to become unresponsive for 5-10secs when moving each one!

Just to find out if it made a difference I kept the same hardware but installed Ubuntu on a new SSD. To compare it to my Windows setup. Both used the latest versions of Chrome, with Linux taking about 20secs longer than Windows.

On windows, I’ve also compared Chrome against Firefox. Which was a draw - both took the same to within a couple of seconds.

Does anyone else have any experience they like to share regarding hardware performance?

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tony1
Participant V

Hi @1minManager. It sounds like there are two performance issues:

  1. Save & Verify is slow
  2. The editor UI is slow

For (1), the slowdown is likely happening on AppSheet’s servers. Save & Verify involves checking your app definition and its resources (sheets, templates, etc.). If your app definition is really big, or your data is really big, or you have many resources to check, then can be slow. Buying a new computer won’t do anything to help with this part.

For (2), the slowdown is happening on your computer, which is running the web browser that renders the AppSheet editor. It’s possible that buying a new computer would help, but not necessarily.

Either way, these seem like opportunities for performance optimizations on AppSheet’s side. I’ll share this with our team.

Austin
Participant V

I don’t know how hugely complicated our largest app is compared to yours but we have 28 tables, 20 slices, 43 views, 70~ actions, probably in the 50k ish rows, quite a few virtual columns with very expensive formulas, and a few of these formulas that are about 100 lines with lookups, counts, ifs,ands,ors. It only takes few seconds to save. We are on above average desktops(intel 8700 with a nvidia 1070 and 64gb of ram) with above average internet.
We did have an app that had 300k rows and it slowed down our editor a good bit when working in that even with a single view and a single table so.
Hope this helps you judge your situation.

Austin, how does that app you described perform on a phone? Do you use security filters to greatly limit what data is needed in the app on the phone? What is your back end?

Currently I have:

  • 25 Tables
  • 266 Columns
  • 57 Slices
    UX Summary * 153 Views
  • 4 Format Rules
    Behavior Summary * 90 Actions
  • 10 Workflow Rules

I’m getting close to finishing the build and need to work on optimization, like reducing virtual columns where possible. I’ve learned so much in the five or so months I’ve been working on this, I’m sure there are more efficient ways of doing things than I did in the beginning. Half or more of my users will have poor Wifi and older phones and computers so I need efficiency.

Is there a way to keep AppSheet from re-creating system views that I’ve deleted? I don’t know if they slow the app down if I never touch them.

No.

Hi @Lucinda_Mason This is what Praveen said:
“Removing views will make the app only marginally lighter. It might remove some editor clutter though.”

Thanks Praveen and Fabian.

So column definitions mean everything in this screenshot?

Wouldn’t it make sense to allow us to delete, or have AppSheet not add, the _RowNumber to every single table? I make a primary key column in every table. Why do I need the _RowNumber column added? I’ve even had AppSheet tell me I can’t hide it.

[_RowNumber] column is a necessity provided you need to port your dababase to Cloud SQL, because in SQL, RowNumber is the KEY column by-default unless specified otherwise.

Thanks. I did not know that.

We do not use this app on the phone. It’s a replacement for our Accounts Payable software so only a single user uses this app on their phone.

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