UX / View Manager issues / performance problems

[Jamie]

Was a change made recently to the UX/Views feature in the editor? All of a sudden it is crawling on multiple machines & browsers, especially when adding views to a dashboard. I can barely scroll the list of views to add and the CPU & fan on my machine are overloaded.

It also seems that the view “suggestions” (Group Rows, Sort Table Rows, Etc.) will not go away even when I dismiss them:

As soon as I click on a different view they return to the table where I just dismissed the recommendation. I have little blue dots next to almost every view and can’t make them permanently go away. Not sure if these two issues are related, but seems more than just coincidence.

Anybody else feeling this sudden pain which started this weekend?

Thanks!

[TDhers]

HI Jamie,
We have had a bit of churn over the week-end and are about to push a new build within the next few minutes to production sites.
Would be great if you can confirm whether you are still experiencing this after the new build is dropped… I’ll let you know once the sites are updated…

Thierry

[TDhers]

Hi Jamie,
The new build just dropped on our US servers. Could you please check whether you are still experiencing the same issues?
Thank you
Thierry

[Jamie]

I’m afraid so, Thierry. Still can’t clear the view recommendations and adding views to a dashboard is unusable.

[TDhers]

Thank you Jamie. Sorry about this poor experience. We have a repro now too. We are investigating.
THierry

[TDhers]

HI Jamie,
We are able to reproduce the suggestion coming back if you dismiss them, though they do not come back if you accept them.
But we are not able to get to a point where the browser is thrashing or performance for adding views to Dashboard is unbearable.
Can you give us a sense of what scale your ap works at? How many views do you have in that Application?
Do you repro the same resource exhaustion on your machine/browser with all other apps too?

Thank you Jamie for your help and patience with us.
Thierry
@Adam @praveen ^

[pravse · Accepted solution]

@Jamie , in another couple of hours, we expect to have a fix that might minimize the effects you are seeing. Do let us know. Thanks

[pravse]

It would help us to know how many tables and views your app has. Thanks

[Jamie]

Good morning – I believe my App would politely be called ginormous:

• 171 Tables
• 1891 Columns
• 43 Slices
• 765 Views

Despite this, I have not had any problems in the past when manipulating / adding views to dashboards. It feels to me like something definitely changed over the weekend.

Another observation I can report is that it seems especially bad on one of my machines where I am exclusively using the Edge Chromium browser. I am going to put Chrome on that machine and see if it helps.

[Bellave_Jayaram]

Wow, that’s impressive!! What kind of app is it and why did you decide that it needs to be a single app, may I ask?

[Jamie]

It is an IT Software Management tool. One of the reasons there are so many tables is that I decided early on not to use Enum types for lookups and everything would be a SQL table even if it was only to store a handful of potential values. In that way (and this partly answers @Austin_Lambeth’s question) it is much wider than it is deep. Only a handful of tables will have many thousands of rows. It was recommended to me that I break it into multiple apps once I started to realize the scope. My concern was (and is) that there are so many tables that are referenced across the entire feature set that it would be quite difficult to find the seams to split it up and then I would have to maintain multiple apps throughout the entire development. I have always thought that I may still have to split it up, but that I would & could do so after completing the full feature set so I could do most of the development on a single app. Is there a day of reckoning on the horizon for these decisions? Maybe. Will it be more difficult to cleave apart now than it would have been to maintain 6 apps over the past year of development? Maybe. Sync times average 15-20 seconds, depending on the AppSheet server load it seems.

[TDhers]

HI Jamie,
Thank you for shedding some light in your decision making. No judgement pass on my end, I"m just offering an alternative.
We aim to keep improving the performance of sync, data querying and editor page rendering. It is work that will never stop and that we can never call done. There is always more to be done. As we improve the app performance, people will build more sophisticated and larger application, so they will demand more perf. It’s a never ending cycle.
So I sure hope we keep improving it for you in your current configuration too… Though with performance work, it is always super difficult to predict and set expectations about which part will improve, how much and for which scenarios specifically.
Thank you for the great work you are doing with our platform. We are definitely super proud that it allows you to build the app that you seek valuable and critical to your business.

Thierry

[Jamie]

Update: I am now back in action this morning. I switched to Chrome instead of Edge Chromium. I also notice that the View suggestions are no longer showing on virtually all of my views and when I dismiss a suggestion it now goes away permanently. Not sure exactly what, if any, relationship there is between these two issues and how Edge Chromium factors into it. I have to get some work done and then I will circle back to Edge and see if both or either issue is still present there.

[Bahbus]

Clear the cache just in case on Edge.

[Austin]

Im curious what your sync times are like for an app that size? how many rows do you bring in at a time with that many tables?

[TDhers]

THank you Jamie for the feedback and updates on your situation. Yes we made a fix (roll back) on a change that was done a few days ago that led to suggestion appearing and not being discarded properly. We will fix it and re-rll out it later.
Yes Ginormous might be the right word for it.
You know there is an App launcher feature that might be something you might want to investigate.
It allows you to break your apps into multiple but yet have them all collected and launchable from an app launcher start screen.
It gives you more modularity, more flexibility for maintenance and possibly better speed for all and everyone.
You might want to check these out…

help.appsheet.com

Create App Launchers or Launch Apps and URLS from AppSheet Apps

How to make app launchers and launch apps from apps.

App Launcher - "External" Apps Questions

Can I have other applications represented within the app launcher? I imagine they would of course have to have them already on their device, but so that they could launch say TSheets from inside an app launcher.

https://www.appsheet.com/samples/This-app-uses-a-gallery-view-to-create-a-home-landing-page-for-the-...

Thierry

[Austin]

Play a drinking game with the word rollback and Appsheet would be slightly dangerous to your health.

[Austin]

Our Training Tracking app is similar, could probably be 5 tables but is actually 16 to control the dropdowns.