Potential Causes for Performance issues (loading time, saving time) in Smartsheet workspace/sheet

moraki

Dear all,

We have developed a Smartsheet workspace for our customer and he has complained recently that his team is encountering performance issues, with delays in the loading time of this specific workspace, and the main master sheet. The workspace users have trouble with the significantly delaying time to load the sheet and most importantly to save it, after making changes, during their every day work.

From the literature that is available online, we have read that there may be various reasons for a delay in loading time of Smartsheet (like Large sheet size, data volume, formulas, browser performance, concurrent users, etc.), but these do not apply in our case, as the sheet is not too big in number of columns and data rows.

Can someone suggest ways to monitor the functionality of the master sheet, in order to detect the causes that provoke the delay?

Have someone faced similar issues in the past, and if yes, which were the main causes detected, and how did you resolve the issue?

Finally, what is considered an acceptable AVG loading time of a sheet, as well as an acceptable AVG delay in saving a sheet?

Thank you in advance for your feedback and inputs.

Best Regards,

Maria Moraki

Matt Lynn ACT

@moraki Yes I've experience this several times. The causes have been some of the following:
1.) Sometimes new users coming from excel are use to using workbooks where all the tabs are still the same file and are almost instantly updated where as in SS the tabs usually become sheets thus not always and instantly in sync. Point… sometimes it's just they're expectations are incorrect.

2.) I have seen sheets that were just being asked to do too much. For example not long ago I had a sheet that had no external connections or cross references but it exceeded the 25m inter sheet reference limit. The sheet had so many helper columns referencing other columns it killed itself. And that was only at 1200 rows and 40 visible columns. So it had to be redesigned. That one is a case where the user wanted the sheet to be AI and do their job for them. As I told them you have PMs but you're scared of them making decisions… you can't outsource the main job of a PM to a if statement. Maybe sub roles or questions yes but not the majority of their job. The had reduced their job to a checkbox clerk.

3.) Recently I had a client that wasn't using that many cells, rows or columns, but had 80k attachments in one sheet. While the attachment itself isn't housed/stored in the sheet, the sheet did have to manage the relationship to the server that did house it. It was just too much. At the end of the day SS isn't a file storage system to that scale. So we setup a link column where each row/item had a sharepoint location with the same structure and they'd click that link to go to their files.

4.) Lastly even if you're not doing too many formula or attachments etc, if you're bumping up against that 500k cells or 20k rows or 400 columns, it will slow it down depending on other little things. Supposedly "any day" that limit is going to massively increase but for now… my personal limits are much less than 20k rows, 500k cells.