New Formula Engine: Noticing No Performance Improvement

John Sauber

Hello, 

 

Has anyone noticed any performance improvments with the new formula engine? We are not noticing any changes in performance since the update. Things that tend to lag or hesitate on our large, complex sheets are:

• -Scrolling (horizontal and vertical)
• -Unhiding many columns
• -Conditional formatting rendering
• -Moving (or cutting/pasting) rows around the sheet
• -Deleting several rows near the top of a complicated sheets errors out with startling regularity and this has to be done with just a few rows at a time, or they have to be moved little by little to the bottom of our sheet before they can be removed.

None of this has changed since the formula engine update from my perspective. How about yours?

Joe Williams

Same issues.  No noticable improvements.  Not that formulas were reliable to begin with because they are too easily corruptable or break when users insert lines... dumb smartsheet "rules" about when to apply formulas.  

 

In any case, the user interface is very laggy in large sheets.  To sometimes get around that, we migrate "old" line items to an archive sheet so we're only working with active data.  That won't work for everything, obviously, but it does work for some things.  

John Sauber

Good idea about archiving lines.

 

We do perform this activity on several sheets which tend to grow quickly. We have steps in place to systematically bring lines which are no longer needed into an archive if they need preservation, or delete if they will not be referenced again. It's a pretty complex system for mitigating this, but we feel that the tradeoff is worth it, because we're reporting like crazy against these sheets, and of course, the reports are a very stable and safe way to get at the data we need.

John Creason

John - Thank you for the honest assesment on this one.  And thank you for sharing your sheet so that we could take a deeper look.  In your example, the performance issue was in how Smartsheet applies conditional formatting - not in how it calculates formulas.  

 

The upshot of this is that we were able to take your example and make some significant performance improvements in how conditional formatting is processed.  I look forward to hearing your thoughts once we ship these improvements.  I will be in touch in advance of that release so that I can receive your feedback at that time.

 

John Creason

CTO, Smartsheet

John Sauber

@John Creason, 

 

We are happy to help in any ways we reasonably can. Smartsheet is a well-loved tool at this Company and we appreciate being able to communicate directly with you guys through the Support and Community channels.