Power Automate - Is this normal behavior of Flow

[ItchyEye]

New member here, but I've learned alot by reading through the support community.  Thank you for all the contributions.

I have a seemingly simple flow that parses a csv file into an array so that it can be uploaded into a sharepoint list.  The screenshot below will show how the flow looks.  It's the last step, the one that loops through the array and writes to the sharepoint list, that is giving me the problem.  After 8 or so minutes, the timeout will occur.  The strange thing about it is, when I view the sharepoint list, all of the data is there.  All 2499 records (in my flow).  Should I be concerned about the timeout?  Will this flow be reliable?

I do have concurrency control turned on and set at 50.  

Any help is appreciated

[Pstork1]

I noticed the 'i' in a circle above the final loop. That indicates that you've set run after settings on that loop. What run after settings are you using?

[ItchyEye]

I was fiddling with anything to get the flow to not timeout.  I had ticked the "has timed out". I've since disabled that "runs after".  My issue remains.  Any ideas?  I tried it again this morning and it still times out...but the data does all write to the list (albeit very slow).

[Pstork1]

Can you show what you are doing inside the loop?  I suspect its not the loop itself that is timing out, but one of the actions inside the loop.  I have loops that run for hours without timing out.  But the individual actions inside the loop each take under a minute.

[ItchyEye]

Sure thing.  thanks for helping.  

[Pstork1]

The Create Item inside the loop is the problem. Title is a required field by default in SharePoint and you will need to fill it in with something when creating an item.  I suspect that is causing the create item to fail and retry multiple times, which is leading to a timeout.

[ItchyEye]

Hi @Pstork1, I gave your suggestion a try and populated the 'Title' field with a timestamp (just to put something in).  I was really thinking this was going to work out, however it still timed out around 9 minutes.  The peculiar thing I noticed was when the flow is running, it takes about 2 to 3 minutes before the blank list begins populating with data.  Only around 600 or so rows were written.  Flow is still going.  Then, at the 5 minute mark, another 600 rows populated (so far around 1200 rows written).  It seems to be writing 600 or so lines at a tiime.  At the 9 minutes mark, the flow timed out with about 2400 records written.  Here is the interesting part: after another 10 minutes or so of real time (after timeout), the remainder of the records finally showed up in the list.  It's almost as if the flow completed and the actual writing to the SharePoint list is catching up in the background.  

The timestamp for all the records was when the flow started, not when the records were written to the list.  Is that a clue?  I was expecting the timestamps to be different.

Sorry for being a pain, I'm struggling with this one.  Thank you

[Pstork1]

Not sure if I have asked this or not.  Did you enable concurrency in the settings of the loop?  SharePoint updating every 5 minutes isn't that peculiar. it runs on about a 5 minute polling time and updates will often batch up at about 5 minutes when the system is heavily loaded.

[ItchyEye]

I do have concurrency turned on and have the slider all the way up to 50.  

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@Pstork1 wrote:

... it runs on about a 5 minute polling time and updates will often batch up at about 5 minutes when the system is heavily loaded.

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Having said that, shouldn't the flow wait for all the data to write before timing out?  I know all the data is getting written, so the timeout is what is puzzling me.  If any flow items needed to be executed after the loop, it wouldn't get done.  

I appreciate you helping.  Any other things to try?

[Pstork1 · Accepted solution]

Two things. 

1) The timeout is a timeout on the acknowledgement of the creation it doesn't necessarily mean that it wasn't created.

2) The timeout in this case would lead to a retry so I think things that run after the loop will still run.