Bulk uploading causes tons of automation failure emails

Are you aware of the limitations of the CSV importer? There are some other relevant links below that article, think they might help you confirm what exactly is happening.

Yeah we’re already using the CSV import app instead of the standard CSV import and I get that we’re trying to add a lot of records but its more an issue that occurs when an automation has a lot of things to do at once than with CSV imports. The same thing happens when we bulk update a field to contain a certain value that then triggers an automation on each of those records.

Is it possible these automations are timing out on the server—Airtable’s—side? Have you checked their logs?

None of them use external requests so they shouldn’t be failing that way. And its all simple stuff like update records field to x etc. The most complex one randomly generates two numbers then updates a record to contain those two numbers but that shouldn’t be intense enough to cause a timeout.

What is the trigger for your automation(s)? If it’s something like “When record updated”, it may be multi-firing depending on how each record is updating as a result of the CSV import process. It’s nice to envision a clean all-at-once update where all fields are populated simultaneously, but it’s possible that several micro-updates are happening in succession. This would lead to multiple automation triggers, with some automations being fed incomplete record data, and only one being fed the fully-updated record.

Its on a on created trigger. So automation 1 sets some defaults for the record one of these defaults is a strategy, whenever the strategy is set another automation is trigger to populate another randomly generated field. So it shouldn’t be getting invalid data in.

Sorry for the delayed reply. My gut feeling on this is to revise how the system operates. Instead of triggering each record separately, I’d be more inclined to use a script to batch-process incoming records. In fact, the script could even handle parsing of the CSV file and creation of new records (rather than using other CSV import methods). The biggest benefit would be that it would only need to run once to process everything vs an automation that runs thousands of times. If you’d like to explore scripting options, message me.

In the meantime, I recommend talking to Airtable support directly (if you haven’t done so already) about the volume of error emails that you’re receiving using your current process.