Very Poor Flow Designer Performance

[Anonymous]

Most of my flows have 50+ actions and when I open them to edit them the webpage either crashes or it takes ages for the flow actions ot be interactable on click. Is anyone else having this kind of poor performance in the flow designer? I am surprised I didn't find anything posted on the forums about this.

[v-micsh-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anonymous,

Thanks for the feedback.

Haven't experenced with a flow with more than 20 actions.

I think the issue may be related with the Browser performance.

If available, please consider break the flow into two or more seperate ones.

Regards,

Michael

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the response.

What is the maximum number of actions that a single Flow can handle?

Is Flow attempting to be a workflow tool for an enterprise or just a IFTTT competitor where you should only use it for simple automation?

[v-micsh-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anonymous,

Check the following article for the Flow limits:

Limits and configuration in Microsoft Flow

“

The maximum number of actions that a single flow can handle is: 250

You can add nested workflows to extend this as needed.

”

I think the following article should be helpful to understand what is Microsoft Flow:

Choose between Flow, Logic Apps, Functions, and WebJobs

Regards,

Michael

[Anonymous]

I am well under 250 actions on my flows and they all are performing similarly. They take a long time to load if they load, otherwise the page becomes unresponsive. When I click on an action (Send Email) to expand it and edit the contents it can take upward of 30 seconds to load and about half the time the page just goes unrepsonsive.

The max is 250 but the recommened number is much, much less? Or does my performance issue have nothing to do with the number of actions in my workflow?

[Jose1]

Yeah, I'm experiencing the same issue. I barely have less than 20 actions, and I want to bang my head on the table. It is too slow. I don't know why they advertise a limitation of 250 steps when performance degrades below 20 steps.

[rmcsmile]

I'm having the same issues and have been for a while. There are a few posts on this it would be nice to have some direction on why this is happening.

[CJH]

Having exactly the same problem with all the flows I've put together, even with very small numbers of steps. Very slow performance on the flow designer UI.

[Anonymous]

Can you please provide more useful information?  This is a problem for a ton of us, and I've yet to be able to see a useful reply from anyone at Microsoft on any thread.  I am probably around 50 objects in my Flow (out of the 250 supposedly supported) and Flow is UNUSABLE MOST OF THE TIME.  

No Internet issues here - very fast quick, and have no problems on other sites (well, other than, errr... Microsoft PowerApps - though that is much better than in the past).

Can someone PLEASE address these performance issues?

[Mupps]

Thank you for highlighting this, @Anonymous.  Good work.

I'm having a similar experience.  I'm a relative newbie with Flows and so only now are my Flows growing in complexity enough to be affected by limits.  Although at 40 actions, I'm way below the claimed 250.

If the solution is to split Flows into small Flows which then call each other, this adds its own complexities, just in a different places.

I’m finding the Flow designer UI almost unusable.  The Approval functionality, and the ability to process this via a phone app is good, but even so, I’m seriously considering having done with Flow altogether.

There remains a deafining silence in terms of a solution.

[Mupps]

I've stumbled across an unlikely, partial work around.

Refresh the page.

In my experience, once a Flow has been set up, it runs fairly reliably, so from an end-user perspective there is no issue.  The two big issues for me are loading the Flow page to edit a flow and, once a Flow has loaded, expanding an Action to edit it.

Loading the Flow page can take ages – sometime a few seconds, which is frustrating, to several minutes, which is unworkable.  When you’re faced with the spinning circles, try a page refresh and the page will often load (almost) immediately.

I’ll leave it to other  to suggest what this means in terms of a cause or a solution.

[Anonymous]

I REALLY wish Microsoft would comment on this and fix it.  Its rearing its ugly head again, and something that should take me 15 seconds to change, takes FOREVER.  

Appears to depend on time of day (though happens on and off throughout the day sometimes).  My Flow is running in the westus region.

Really regret the decision to use MS Flow for this project...  this being the #1 issue right now and makes it almost impossible to make any changes.  

Between this and other basic stuff that "should just work" like the wonky way it handles null values and lack of proper error handling - I've wasted more time than I can keep track of.  

[Anonymous]

I do want to say that I have moved away from creating flows that are longer than ~10 actions. Here are some reasons why:

1. When you create complex/large flow with multiple steps of approval or otherwise you run the risk of an action sitting and waiting for longer than 30 days. A flow will auto terminate if an action waits longer than 30 days. I had to learn this the hard way (is there any other way though?).
2. The mentality that a flow action has a expiration with a ceiling of 30 days tells me that Microsoft's mentality around how a flow should be developed should be bit sized actions that start > perform the action > then terminate. If you have an action that requires an external input, you are better off to have another flow start when that decision is reached.
3. All my flows are connected to powerapps now. So it actually makes sense from a development standpoint to have flows tied to user actions on buttons within the powerapp. These flows are generally at most 5 actions and finish in a matter of seconds and then wait for more input in the powerapp.
4. I am ok with limiting my flows to less steps. It makes it much less of a headache when a flow fails. If a giant flow fails, you have to start it over from the beginning, where if a small flow fails you can just start that little bit of logic over and your end user is non the wiser.

I do agree that there should be some clearer communication on what real limits there are when developing more complex flows and that those limits are communicated while authoring the flow. But for now flow has proven to be extermely intuitive for our needs and it integrates automatically with 90% of our chosen solutions.

[Mupps]

What is meant by “may be related with the Browser performance”? Related how? And which browser is recommended?

I use Chrome by default but often try Edge (I vainly thought that running a Microsoft product on a Microsoft product would improve performance. I was wrong), Internet Explorer and even Firefox, but it doesn’t make a difference.

In my case, it really isn't about browser performance. Because Flow performance is often so abysmally poor, I multi-task. My other, concurrent browser-based tasks or activities do not perform badly. I have twice had helpdesk technicians from Microsoft on a Skype call witnessing the poor performance. They tried to claim it was “probably” bandwidth or network issues, until I pointed out that the Skype call we were on was functioning very well.

There seem to be a lot of excuses flying around, but no answers. The suggestion that a large Flow be broken down into smaller Flows baffles me. The word “Flow” strongly implies a stream of data or a fluid process. Breaking up a Flow is entirely contrary to this - perhaps Microsoft should consider rebranding the product and call it “Stutter”, “Stumble” or “Falter” - and would be a maintenance nightmare. If I broke up my ~40-action Flow into, say, five separate Flows, those five Flows would each need to be kicked off when a record changed, just to see if it was its turn to do anything. That’s sounds very inefficient. If I’m going to break out like this, I’ll use SharePoint Workflow for the intricate logic and throw the crumbs to Flow when I need to send Approval mails.

And can someone explain why this post has been marked “Solved”?

[Jose1]

Why was this marked as solved?

[rmcsmile]

This has not been solved... 

[Anonymous]

Amusing thing is the browser that is the WORSE with Flow is MS Edge...  Especially in some of the text boxes, etc makes it impossible, or difficult to edit text.  Much of this works fine in Chrome or Firefox - when there aren't Flow editor performance issues.  

And BTW - on of my Flows is 50+ objects - sometimes performance is good (like now (knock on wood)).  Sometimes it is unbearable (like my prior reply).  

But I'm doing this as more of a "realtime process" - not doing approvals here - pulling data from Salesforce for a bit of transformation and then sending results to a third party service for formatting.  Works very well overall (runtime) - but designer performance at times it unbearable.  Error handling is still difficult at best, though I think I have finally found a workaround that while not optimal, at least helps.  

[Kevinland]

I'm getting an "Encountered internal server erro from the designer" when I try to pick an action. The tracking Id is 'fd2c17bd-10b2-495b-8c87-6bd12b887940'.

[nerfherder]

this appears tied to individual system performance in the editor, the better the CPU/the more RAM, the less performance slowdowns we see. Could someone from microsoft please publish adequate recommended system requirements for operating/editing a Flow with 500/400/300/200/100/Under 100 actions? Would be LOVEly. Thank you<3

[nerfherder]

@Mupps i created a tag called "Marked Solved Incorrectly" that better get some optical scanners on this. the problem is that microsoft neglects to point out how important individual's computer specs are when it comes to this super annoying pain point in an otherwise wonderful product.