Smartsheet - excess data usage

Chris Green

We have a large Smartsheet used in our warehouse that is on throughout the day. It automatically refreshes via a chrome browser extension every hour.

It is the sole use of this computer, no other programs are run. The computer is generally on 24/7 but sometimes it does manage to switch itself off.

The refresh needs to happen as many other employees access and update this sheet from other devices. 

The data usage is generally 1-2 GB per day when doing this.
However, every month or so, the data usage jumps to 300 GB for a day and exhausts our internet data cap.

The smartsheet is large, with many documents attached to rows. 

Any idea on why there is such a large increase in data on random occasions? Any ideas on how to reduce this?

Shaz

You will need to verify refresh logic of chrome extension. Its logic might be refreshing sheet periodically for every few seconds. Every refresh downlaod data including attachments. This will cause huge data downloaded everytime and lead to your 300gb. If the extension is developed by you, or a third party you can ask them to change the logic by setting up a webhook to listen to the changes and refresh only on webhook event. This will reduce data downlaod.

Alternatively you can build a new extension that can push the changes listened by webhook event to the cells instead of refeshing whole sheet with attachements will drastically bring down data usage to 2gb.

I would recommend to build an app that updates sheet placed over a dashboard for better