SCC suddenly very slow on provisioning

Matt Stewart

What are reasons that may cause provisioning to slow to a crawl?

previously the provisioning worked fairly well and would finish with a link to jump to dashboard. Now suddenly as of yesterday the provisioning is crawling and seems to stick at the "running Rollup/Summary" stage which then finally times out with an error saying its taking longer than expected and to come back later.

if i then go to my intake sheet, i can see the project is provisioned, but that many of the incoming links or data that pulls back into the intake says its broken links. eventually after maybe another 5 mins, it will refresh and everything works fine.

ive cleaned up my blueprint and offloaded a lot of formulas to multiple sheets so that there is less stress on any one sheet limitations. i only have a few sheets and reports, a total of 35 items that are mostly reports. But none of that changed. The sheets do have some cross sheet formulas indexing other portfolio sheets or other databases, but like i said ive split those up on a few sheets to reduce the load. I only have a few small automations on project plan as well, which did not change.

So just wondering what would be a good thing to investigate for causing the slowness?

Matt Stewart

thanks, and yes i worked with support to determine that SS does not like "centralized databases". The provisioning works best if you duplicate lots of information, which is incredibly odd to me.

I was leveraging single database sheets, for example resources or holidays, etc, outside my blueprint. The project plan inside the blueprint then accessed this data in a few spots to leverage latest info. This reduces the number of sheets inside the blueprint and allows for a single source of truth. This apparently breaks SCC.

Instead i was instructed to move all those "centralized" sheets and duplicate them within the blueprints. This means every project now has its own version of this sheet and i have to manage all of these sheets via Global Updates to make a fix, instead of managing through a single sheet and the cross sheet formulas or inbound/outbound links. again... odd.

In doing this fix the provisioning now is much faster, about 2 mins per project. However Global Updates take hours to resolve, and require multiple rounds of applying before it successfully applies to every instance of the Find/Replace.

Genevieve P.

Hi @Matt Stewart

There are a number of possible causes for slowness in SCC or Smartsheet in general, for example your network speed, browser version, browser extensions, along with the complexity of the items you're provisioning.

I would recommend reviewing the troubleshooting points noted in this article: Issue: Smartsheet Is Continuously Loading, Not Responding, or Not Displaying Certain Items

If this is consistently happening, I would recommend reaching out to Smartsheet Support with a screen recording of the issue and the different things you've investigated (ex. network speed, or tried a different browser).

Thanks,

Genevieve

Matt Stewart

this is not an issue with anything you mentioned @Genevieve P. but good to know this for future. I am referring to the actual project provisioning in SCC.

The provisioning used to take about 30-60 secs and finish with a congrats and a link to launch the dashboard.

Now the provisioning seems to time out on the running rollup/summaries section, and then errors out with :

this never happened before but started happening after i made some edits to my project structure. so im trying to figure out what could cause slowness in the SCC setup itself. Once the poject is up and running there doesnt seem to be issues im noticing (yet) but would like to squash any potential issues before i migrate our entire portfolio into this.

Genevieve P.

Hi @Matt Stewart

Thank you for the additional information! It sounds like perhaps your project complexity has increased (more cell links, cross-sheet formulas, conditional formatting rules, etc). Without seeing your exact set-up and the details that you changed, it's difficult to pinpoint what may be causing the slow load time.

I would still recommend working with Support with the details mentioned above so they can work with you in a private channel and you can share screen recordings.

Cheers,

Genevieve

Matt Stewart

thanks, and yes i worked with support to determine that SS does not like "centralized databases". The provisioning works best if you duplicate lots of information, which is incredibly odd to me.

I was leveraging single database sheets, for example resources or holidays, etc, outside my blueprint. The project plan inside the blueprint then accessed this data in a few spots to leverage latest info. This reduces the number of sheets inside the blueprint and allows for a single source of truth. This apparently breaks SCC.

Instead i was instructed to move all those "centralized" sheets and duplicate them within the blueprints. This means every project now has its own version of this sheet and i have to manage all of these sheets via Global Updates to make a fix, instead of managing through a single sheet and the cross sheet formulas or inbound/outbound links. again... odd.

In doing this fix the provisioning now is much faster, about 2 mins per project. However Global Updates take hours to resolve, and require multiple rounds of applying before it successfully applies to every instance of the Find/Replace.