Errors with repeating groups on automations?

Hi ​@Mike_AutomaticN,

I’ve never seen that before… and I just tested this on my end, and it worked fine for me. (See my screenshot below.)

So it’s probably some sort of a bug on Airtable’s end… it’s good that you opened a support ticket with them!

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

Hey ​@Mike_AutomaticN,
I have also tried that method, and it has worked for me as well.

Although I am not certain, you could also try clearing the browser cache and attempting the action again.

👍

Thanks to both ​@ScottWorld and ​@dilipborad.

I finally got an answer from Airtable -see copy and paste below.

“Hi,

Thanks for your patience while we looked into this.

The error you’re encountering is due to a system safeguard that limits the number of pending automation actions within a single base. When the queue of pending actions exceeds a certain threshold, Airtable temporarily blocks additional automation steps from running. This helps protect the system and prevent wider performance issues.

That said, delays or blocks can still occur if many automations are triggered simultaneously or if the queue grows faster than it can be processed. To help mitigate this, we recommend staggering triggers where possible; for example, spacing out large updates or dividing work across multiple automations or bases when appropriate.

i hope this clarifies your concerns.”
 

Unfortunately this does not clarify much :(

I sent a follow up email asking:
1. What is considered a "Pending automation action"?
2. What is the threshold?

Just in case, we are migrating the most important automations which were failing to n8n (could have been any other automation tool), as it seems that new issues could come up pretty much unexpectedly with such set of Airtable automations.

I’ll keep you posted on updates :D. Thanks guys!

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

Thanks for posting their response, ​@Mike_AutomaticN!

LOL, yeah, this doesn’t give us much clarity nor give us much in the way of solutions.

Similar to what you said above, this lack of transparency & lack of control over our own automations is yet another reason to keep building our automations in Make or N8N!

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

Hello ​@Mike_AutomaticN,
This is really interesting information to know. 
I know there are certain limits with using Airtable Automation.

• Total Automations per Base:

  You can create up to 50 automations within a single Airtable base. This limit applies to both active and inactive (turned-off) automations. 

• Actions per Automation:

  Each individual automation can contain up to 25 actions. 

• Following Condition and Repeat Step, there will be additional actions.

• The script block (step) has a 60-second execution time.

Now about this limitation that mention on Airtable response that’s happens multiple times when we use multiple Script Block with Automation. Because Airtable Automation is a non-Asynchronous process when we use Automation Script block, It’s waits until first automation is done.

Not 100% sure but that’s why that limits of the number of pending automation is reached to exceeds a certain threshold.

Interested to know more about 

What is the threshold?

Hey ​@dilipborad!

Yup, I’ve described some of such hard limits here.

Also, below please find Airtable answer to my specific questions:

“Hello!

Happy to clarify further.

A pending automation action refers to any automation step that has been triggered but has not yet completed execution. This includes all types of actions (e.g., sending an email, updating a record, running a script) that are waiting in the queue to be processed. These actions can accumulate quickly, especially if many automations are triggered at once or if some actions take longer to complete.

Airtable places a safeguard limit at over 100,000 pending automation actions within a given application. Once this threshold is exceeded, the system temporarily blocks further automation actions from running to help protect overall performance and stability.

To avoid hitting this limit, we recommend monitoring how frequently automations are triggered and considering ways to stagger or distribute workflows, such as using delays, batching, or splitting work across bases when appropriate.

I trust this information will help to clarify your concerns.“

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

Oh wow, did you have 100,000 pending automations?

​@ScottWorld Still can’t believe 😮

Oh wow, did you have 100,000 pending automations?

I mean, his company is Automatic Nation, automating a whole nation takes a lot of automations 🤣

• Hi,
  I used to avoid running more than 100 automation at a time. Long time ago I set autolinking automation for a table with 5k records and when I tried to autolink several hundreds, I’ve noticed perfomance issues, with automations started within a long time, several minutes. Part of automation runs were failed.  
  I feel that Airtable perfomace significally increases, and I think, now this number is much more than 100 (I mean, automation runs at a time), but I didn’t test the limits. 
  
  In your scenario, there are two important questions
  - How much records in Find Records results?
  - How do you trigger your automation? (i mean do you single click a checkbox on a record or performing a multi-check on a number of records)
  
  Like if you copy ‘1’, select 100 records and paste into checkbox fields. It will run 100 automations simultaneously, each can find a possible maximum 1000 in Find Records, running repeated group looping through 1000 record updates. That’s how theoretically 10**5 actions can be reached.
  In real, I can suppose you might run several automation instances trying to perform update operations on the same or almost same set of records. I don’t know how update in repeated group works under cover, maybe it can cause deadlock or other type of locks conflict.
  Anyway, you have more info in your Automations history.

I do have some automations with scripts that for some reason are taking days to get fully executed (without running into TimeOut error, which is strange) -seems to be an issue in itself. Having said that, for sure I do not have 100,00 pending actions, so I’m still having the conv. with support!

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

LOL just got to see this ​@DisraeliGears01!