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Best Practices for Avoiding Automation Backlogs When Using External APIs

  • November 13, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 14 views
M
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Hi everyone, I have a question about automations and what the best practices are when dealing with external API calls.

We have an automation that enriches records by pulling data from Google Maps. Every time a new record is added to the table, a second automation is triggered: it uses an enrichment API to find an email address from the website, verify it, and then update the record.

The issue is that this enrichment step takes a few seconds for each record. Because Airtable runs automations one-by-one and queues them, this causes huge backlogs of pending automations, which slows everything down and sometimes causes the system to get stuck or bug out.

My question is:

What’s the recommended best practice to avoid infinite queues or stuck automations when using external APIs that take a few seconds to respond?

Should we batch records? Or is there a better architectural approach?

Any guidance or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

1 reply

ScottWorld
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  • ScottWorld
  • Genius
  • 9808 replies
  • November 13, 2025

I’m not sure I understand your question? Airtable should eventually work through the queue, but are you trying to get all of your automation runs to perform more quickly — perhaps simultaneously? It sounds like you don’t want to wait for Airtable to finish processing each lengthy automation run before moving onto the next record.

If so, I would recommend rebuilding your automation in Make’s advanced automations, and make sure that you start your automation with a custom webhook that is triggered by Airtable using my instructions in this thread: How to instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable.

The reason for this is because when you start a Make automation with a webhook, it will run all of your automation runs SIMULTANEOUSLY — in other words, it will run the automations as quickly as the webhooks are triggered by Airtable.

You'll still have a queue in Airtable, but you’ll work through the queue much more quickly in Airtable because the lengthy part of your automation is being processed on the Make side simultaneously.

This can actually sometimes cause the OPPOSITE PROBLEM — where the automations run TOO QUICKLY — so Make offers a bunch of tools for slowing down automations, including (1) slowing down the frequency of how often a webhook will process incoming data, (2) setting the automation to run sequentially instead of simultaneously (one at a time, like Airtable), and (3) using Make’s Sleep tool to insert a pause in the automation.

If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread, including a very helpful Loom video that I created.

I also give live demonstrations of how to use Make in many of my Airtable podcast appearances. For example, in this video, I show how to work with Airtable arrays in Make.

Hope this helps!

If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld


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