We have a fairly large base and a few automations that do a lot of things (record matching to de-dupe, creation of secondary records, field sanitization). For the past year we had this all in a single Run Script that would work on Form Submission. Recently our number of records in the main table went over 30K and we started to get these Network Timeouts. Working with Airtable Support, they suggested:
1. removing unnecessary records from the query via Views, Filters, or record deletion for the Query
2. moving each query, update, delete command into it's own Run Script for simple 're-run' of the automation.
3. add try/catch to any base touches in the Run Script
4. use the native airtable functions where possible instead of the Run Script (apparently the built in functions have a retry option on failure, whereas the Run Script you need to add your own Try/Catch retry (which I'll show below)
try/catch: (also added a delay and output options for email notification of errors)
const {
budgetTable,
primaryField,
thisAirtableId,
//I put these in the input variables for easy updates and testing
maxTries, //3
delay, //1000 - in ms
debug, //false to run, true to debug
} = input.config();
const maxTriesInt = parseInt(maxTries); //can't use >= with strings
const delayInt = parseInt(delay);
let errorDetected = '';
//trying a new sleep function to put in a slight delay on retry
//just a short delay to try and allow the network to clear
function sleep(milliseconds) {
var start = new Date().getTime();
for (var i = 0; i < 1e7; i++) {
if ((new Date().getTime() - start) > milliseconds){
break;
}
}
}
const slugTable = base.getTable(budgetTable);//Budget
const slugDailyView = slugTable.getView('Created in last day'); //filter down to the minimum required records to search
let count = 0;
while(true) {
try {
let existingRecords = await slugDailyView.selectRecordsAsync({ fields: [primaryField] });
let mapOfUniqueIdToExistingRecordId = createMappingOfUniqueFieldToRecordId(existingRecords.records, primaryField);
// break out of loop, or return, on success
//I want the retrieved information to be pushed to another Run Script further down in the automation
output.set('existingRecordsJSON', JSON.stringify(existingRecords));
//I want to push the debug, error detection information for other scripts and for email notification later
output.set('debug', debug);
output.set('maxTries', maxTries);
output.set('delay', delay);
output.set('errorDetected', errorDetected);
//if you don't want to exit the script and continue past the try/catch, remove the break;
break;
} catch (e) {
// handle exception
if (count >= maxTriesInt) {
console.error(`Max retries (${maxTriesInt}) exhausted, final error thrown:`);
throw e;
} else {
var d = new Date();
var n = d.toLocaleTimeString('en-US', {timeZone: "America/Chicago"}); //without the timezone, it will show UTC
console.log(n);
console.error(`Error during attempt #${count}:`);
console.error(`Name: `+e.name);
console.error(`Message: `+e.message);
errorDetected = thisAirtableId;
sleep(delayInt);
count++;
}
}
}
