Sometimes, you may come across performance issues with your SmartSuite Solution. Signs of these issues can include:

Encountering performance problems with your Solution can be surprising, especially if it had been functioning smoothly for months or even years. Such issues can arise due to various underlying factors. This article aims to demystify this complex topic and provide practical tips to enhance your Solution's performance both proactively and reactively.

Solution performance can be likened to a queue of tasks that the SmartSuite servers handle on the backend. When users perform actions within the Solution, such as loading a Table, editing a record, or creating a Table, these actions are counted as requests in the queue. While the Solution is capable of processing requests quickly, it can only handle one request at a time.

Consequently, if the queue becomes inundated with too many requests, the ones at the end of the queue must wait their turn to be processed. When there is a high volume of requests in the queue, the last request may experience a delay as it waits for preceding tasks to complete.

It is challenging to precisely quantify a limit or expected delay for processing a backlog of actions as their complexity, data volume, concurrent user load and other factors have an impact. It's important to note that automated actions, rather than human actions, tend to generate high volumes and cause congestion in the request queue.

These automated actions include:

For instance, consider a Solution that incorporates custom API integrations, third-party integrations, and numerous formula fields:

If the external integrations are configured to make requests to the Solution continuously, the request queue may become overloaded. If a human user accesses the Solution while the queue is overwhelmed with integration requests, they may encounter slow loading of Tables or even experience crashes when performing manual actions in the Solution. This occurs because the manual request must wait behind all the API requests.

Therefore, it is crucial to recognize that SmartSuite is not intended to function as a backend hosting service or real-time database like Heroku, Parse, Firebase, or MongoDB. Instead, SmartSuite is primarily designed for use cases where all users interact directly within the SmartSuite UI.

In addition to request volume, Solution and Table record count can impact performance. When you have a large number of records in an Table, tasks such as formula recalculation have a larger impact.

For example, say you have 5 formula fields in a Table that has 20,000 records. Now imagine that you do an import to update a field that is involved in those 5 formulas in each record. The system has to store the 20,000 updates as well as recalculate 100,000 individual formulas - an operation that is significantly more taxing that updating a single record.

Additionally, loading a larger volume of data takes more time and creates load on your Web browser as it renders those values in your Views. We recommend adding a limited number of fields to individual Views, as well as configuring filters to load only those records you are actively working with.

Creating dependencies in your Solutions and Tables is a very powerful feature, but you should also take into account the impact they potentially have on performance. The following list of fields create dependencies and require additional work by the platform to display their values, render the results and may lead to slower load times:

Tables that will contain very large numbers of records should optimize their use of these field types to ensure a smooth, high-performing user experience.

To avoid performance issues or mitigate existing problems, there are several best practices you can follow:

If you have followed the recommendations provided in this article and are still having performance challenges, please feel free to reach out to the SmartSuite support team via Intercom or email. Please include as much of the following information as possible: