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Anyone else experiencing VERY slow automations?

Topic Labels: Automations
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Claire_Conza
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

Hi

I have tried different 4 different techniques to partly duplicate a record:-

  1. Automation record in view

Checkbox triggers automation when record appears filtered view (checkbox true)
Creates record populating two fields, a datefield from source record and the value of a lookup field

(I’ve also tried getting the lookup value from a formula field instead of directly from the lookup field) as per @Jeremy_Oglesby suggestion in another post.

  1. Automation record matches true

As above

  1. Integromat Webhook triggered by record in view

pass record id to integromat webhook
search table for record id
create new record with date and lookup value

  1. Integromat Webhook triggered by record matches

As above

All of them are now taking 30 seconds to execute!

I thought it would be pretty instant especially keeping the functionality all in airtable. I could understand the integromat round trip might take longer but if anything it’s actually faster but still slow!

Any ideas why?

Thanks

Claire

1 Reply 1
Zollie
10 - Mercury
10 - Mercury

Hey Claire. I’d expect an action involving Integormat, a webhook, or any other service outside of Airtable, to be a slower process. In addition to whatever those services are helping you do, just sending/receiving data to that outside service will slow things down a bit. In other words, anything making network requests has the potential to degrade performance. That’s doubly the case if those services are waiting for each other to execute, or if what they’re doing is slow.

Alternative Approaches

I’d take a closer look at each of the steps the Automation is completing in isolation, then see if they could be replaced with faster approaches. For instance, would it be reasonable to use a script instead of Integromat, webhooks etc? If all the code lives within Airtable, it can execute much faster.

Or, if Integromat/Webhooks are essential, you could replace whatever ‘Automations’ does with a script. That script would still need to slowly make network requests, but you could have it run for more than just one record at a time.