Extremely Slow Performance in Flow Designer When Working With Large Flows

[JoshAtBrotech]

Hello Microsoft & the Power Automate Community,

These past couple months, my knowledge of Power Automate and my and ability to use it has expanded rapidly, allowing for our organization to take advantage of Power Automate in ways we were incapable of imagining at the beginning of 2020. It has truly been a fulfilling challenge to learn and use Power Automate.

Lately, I have been working on Flows that will automate business processes that are large in scope, requiring larger Flows with more Action Cards.

Microsoft advertises that Power Automate can handle up to 500 Action Cards in a single Flow, meaning that the product is capable of handling larger Flows.

However, I have noticed that, as the number of Action Cards increases, the performance of the Flow Designer for that specific Flow decreases.

I have a Flow that I have been working on that has approximately 200 Action Cards - so, not even half of the advertised Action Cards per Flow capacity of the Product.

However, at this point, I am essentially incapable of doing additional work on the Flow.

Clicking + New Step results in a lengthy load time, some times several minutes, before I can select which Action Card I want to add, followed by another lengthy load time before the Action Card becomes editable, sometimes with additional lengthy load times while editing, depending on the Action Card being used (Update a Row in an Excel Table, for example, requires another lengthy load time after selecting the Key Column and Key Value). 

In my internet sleuthing, I can see similar issues reported since 2017.

My question to Microsoft and the Power Automate team is, what are my real solutions here?

In the Power Platform Admin Center, our organization's Environment Capacity page shows %87.21 of Database available, & 98.24% of File available, indicating no issues there.

The issue persists across multiple browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Edge), indicating that the issue is not specific to a browser. 

The issue is not present when editing a smaller flow with fewer Action Cards, indicating that the poor performance is specific to larger Flows with more Action Cards, indicating that the issues is specific to the Product.

I do not believe that splitting the Flow into "two flows" is a real solution, as this requires some sloppy dumpage of variables into one location so they can be extracted & communicated in a "part two" of the Flow.

Are there, perhaps, settings, either specific to Flow or to a browser or to the Microsoft Firewall or Microsoft Security settings that can be adjusted to alleviate these issues?

Any insight that Microsoft or the Power Automate Community can provide is greatly appreciated.

[D_Clarke]

It just means if you are breaking the flow into a parent and several child flows you get less steps per flow and that is quicker in the designer as it does not consider the steps in the child flows when doing a save or check.  

[D_Clarke]

With the method above a child flow with a hundred or so steps in it can have three steps in the calling parent flow : 1) to compose an input text from variables, 2) To run the child flow, 3) To parse the output.

If like me you have a solution with one parent flow calling 5 child flows that is potentially 500 steps replaced by 15.

[tmvsivakumar]

I do have the same issue with flow designer while working with bigger flow and I observed issue is happening if the action has many attributes. Else it's looking OK. I am afraid of using new designer as it never set my expectations in performance and it's so disappointing and had to switch back to classic mode.

[pholoabach]

It's been so disappointing to use the new editor. It seems like it was designed by someone who does not use Power Automate on a daily basis. I'd have wanted to be able to like pin/favorite the steps I use the most - we still don't have that. but I did see they're going to enable drafting - that MAY be a benefit if we're able to call previous versions.. but I've not seen THAT function yet. otherwise, it's incredibly clunky to use - and I switch back to classic whenever I can, but I know my time is limited 😞