Ask Me Anything about Quick Base Performance

As an App Administrator I can Show the performance bar and performance analyzer for users in an app. Because I am not typically a user in the app, running reports, adding records etc. Turning this on for myself is not all that helpful. Is there anything in the road map where as the app administration I can turn performance analyzer on and see results from all users and their movements, usage etc? As the app administrator that would be helpful to see and understand to find out what things I might want to work on to improve app performance. Many of our users if we asked them to use it would not know what to do with the information and I believe that should the app admin responsibility. 
Thanks!!!!

Just a anecdotal comment on an app I just did as sometimes users wonder what the performance will be for an app with high record counts.  The typical response on this forum and from support will be the stock answer is "well it will depend on the complexity of your app and especially on the # of summary fields which need to be calculated to display the report or record or dashboard".

In my app there is one main data feed table which is a child to several other Parent tables. It has 1 million records.  The individual size of these child records is small, with not very many fields so the table is only 33% "full" despite the 1 million records 

Each parent table has a small handful of summary fields but these summary fields on some cases are themselves rolled up to higher level Grand Parent records.

The app was specifically planned using Sync Tables for various Parents to be sure that the app is isolated from the rest of our apps.

The app takes a good 30 seconds to wake up if it has been sleeping quietly, but once it loads to memory the response time for a Dashboard which requires the app to summarize these 1 million records on three different reports, is about 5 seconds.  That is quite acceptable to our users.  Since large Excel workbooks also can take a long time to open, we explain that to our users and they understand that the data in the app needs to load to memory, same as Excel - so they have their expectations set for when they wake up the app for the first time in the day.

Other screens which require the app to draw data from these 1 million records, but only need to extract and summarize data for just 1 customer load in under a second or two.

I think that this app performs well because it was designed knowing that Performance was a risk and the # of summary fields is reasonable.  There were other possible designs for the data feed level of aggregation which would have resulted in higher record counts for that million record table, but we estimated that if we kept the record count to about a million without too many fields that we would not hit the table limit of 500 MB and the app response time would be OK.  I was pleased to see that it performs quite nicely.

What is planned to improve the performance of Sync? Using Sync to connect to Salesforce can be a nightmare depending on the number of records. We receive constant Sync failure notifications and the refresh remains in a loop and cannot be cancelled unless I put in a support case with Quick Base.

Are there any plans to improve performance on the Users page when you have a lot of users? I notice when we start hitting a few hundred, it gets very slow to search/filter on that page.

I'm utilizing Automations more. Is there anything I should be aware of to ensure an automation doesn't affect overall QB performance for other users?

1. Would be great to automatically add the summary for # of child records to the parent when creating a relationship

2. Can the Use New Experience be per role or another setting? When turning it off, it doesn't seem to stay off.

Is there anything in the road map in terms of an app/realm performance dashboard. Something that could show:

1. Failed webhooks & automations
2. High frequency permission denials -- possible security or configuration issue
3. Long requests (API queries, dashboards, reports, forms, automations)
4. High frequency data validation errors
5. High volume requests (imports, API actions)

Maybe something that could be toggled on/off for a day, week, month to get some trends for 3-5, and that would probably be a massive volume on your end.

One other thing. Would you guys ever be open to sharing the logic/flow as to how you evaluate a summary field or formula field? My dream would be the ability to 'step through' a summary or formula being evaluated in a debugger kind of experience; but even just having a granular breakdown of the logic would be helpful.

Hi Everyone,

I just wanted to give you all an update to say that we will be starting up the AMA in 10 minutes so if you still have your questions get them in so that Harrison can start reading up!

Hi Janet. Awesome question. In fact, this is in our "Do It Yourself App Oil Change" this year at Empower. In general, the way we recommend handling this (short term) would be to use _Test as Role/User_ and then the Performance Analyzer. If you encourage users to turn on the Performance Bar, and report to you when they see something that looks slower than expected, you should be able to easily replicate that.

Long term, we are definitely interested in providing more information. For example, instrumenting audit logs with transaction processing time so you can do some analysis. We also are working on some realm-level things where we can provide heuristics at a higher level. You would then be able to use this as a guideline of where to focus.