App performance improvement with sharepoint as main datasource

[Anonymous]

Hi all,

Our company application is struggling to cope and is performing quite slow.

The gallery is slow, but is not the absolute worst problem, especially our viewform and editform are very slow when I either press "edit" in the viewform or when I want to "save" the editform. It is frustrating people and becomes a bad user experience.

I have "too many" controls:

My questions are:

1. What controls are they talking about? Are these different formulas I use to filter/visible/all these kind of things? Any tips on how to improve these?

2. Can you guide me in useful direction for how to optimize a sharepoint based application?

3. ClearCollect() something that will improve the performance of the application? Ie. should I clearcollect galleries and collect OnVisible?

4. Will an applications speed (significantly?) improve with premium data sources such as f.x. SQL?

[mdevaney · Accepted solution]

@Anonymous 

This article is a wonderful introduction to optimizing canvas app performance.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/canvas-apps/performance-tips

I will now attempt to answer your specific questions:

1. What controls are they talking about? Are these different formulas I use to filter/visible/all these kind of things? Any tips on how to improve these?  Controls are anything you can see in the left-side tree menu.  The general recommendation is no more than 500 per app though there are exceptions such as controls placed inside galleries

2. Can you guide me in useful direction for how to optimize a sharepoint based application?
The article above will be a good start.  Let me know any follow up questions.

3. ClearCollect() something that will improve the performance of the application? Ie. should I clearcollect galleries and collect OnVisible?  Using collections will improve app performance if you set them up in a manner to reduces the number of calls to the SharePoint API.  Working with local data is also faster than working with remote data.  In essence, collections are your friend.

4. Will an applications speed (significantly?) improve with premium data sources such as f.x. SQL?

The main benefit of SQL and CDS is additional features such as: data-model, delegation, security.  Switching could bring you performance gains but it would not be noticable on small datasets.  To achieve these performance gains you might also need to learn new techniques (e.g. SQL Views) 

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[Anonymous]

@mdevaneythank you very much for the answer. Hope you are staying safe in these times!

I found the article really useful and am already seeing some significant improvements (especially thanks to ClearCollect() combined with Concurrent())

One question I have regarding the tips in  the article:

Avoid repeating the same formula in multiple places

If multiple properties run the same formula (especially if it's complex), consider setting it once and then referencing the output of the first property in subsequent ones. For example, don't set the DisplayMode property of controls A, B, C, D and E to the same complex formula. Instead, set A's DisplayMode property to the complex formula, set B's DisplayMode property to the result of A's DisplayMode property, and so on for C, D, and E.

How does this work in practice? As I mention in the original post I am using a lot of formulas such as "Visible"-properties: If(variable,true, false) (simplified, as they become quite long at times) and others such as If(varUser,displaymode.Edit,Displaymode.View), etc. etc.

Could I improve further with simplifying these?

[mdevaney]

@Anonymous 
I'll show you an example with the Visible property.

First, let's say you have a field in your form that should only be Visible to a Manager.  So you write the condition like this:

If(LookUp(UserRolesList, UserEmail=User().Email, UserRole)="Manager",true, false)

The code above can be shortened to this

LookUp(UserRolesList, UserEmail=User().Email, UserRole)="Manager"

But that's not where the performance gains are found.   That's just a syntax shortening trick

The idea is you don't want to call the LOOKUP several times.  So instead of writing all of that code in each Visible property you would simply want to reference the one you already wrote in the Visible property of other controls.

TextInput1.Visible

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[Anonymous]

@mdevaney  thanks again for the response.

I actually never really use these LOOKUP() functions for Visible/displaymode properties. I usually just use my global variable of User().Email (varUser). But our team is smaller, so I can write varUser="abc@def.com" fx.

If I have a simple Visible property like:

If(ViewStatus = "Pricing", true,false)

Am I wasting my time if I have one with the above and the rest datacard1.Visible or will it potentially have a performance improvement? If there are many fields like that? I am looking for every small improvement point possible 🙂

[mdevaney]

@Anonymous 
If you have a very simple Visible property like that I would say no it likely won't have a significant effect on performance.  You aren't doing any calls to an API or doing calculations since ViewStatus is already a variable.

If(ViewStatus = "Pricing", true,false)

Please note you can write that formula in a shorter way without the IF statement

ViewStatus = "Pricing"

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[Anonymous]

@mdevaneyokay thank you.

Allow me one last slightly stupid question then. I am really just trying to understand what causes under-performance.

If I have a longer, slightly more complicated Visible property formula like:

If(And(cbStage.Selected.Value = "1. Stage", EvaluationStatus = "Yes", Evaluation = "Experience1"), true,false)

[mdevaney]

@Anonymous 

There's no stupid questions when it comes to optimization.  It's a different way of thinking and it requires practice. 

Lets say you have 20 Visible fields with this code.  The PowerApp has to do this calculation twenty times. 

If(And(cbStage.Selected.Value = "1. Stage", EvaluationStatus = "Yes", Evaluation = "Experience1"), true,false)

Instead, you could store the value in variable that will output. either true or false.  We do this because the calculation will only be done once.

Set(varIsVisible, And(cbStage.Selected.Value = "1. Stage", EvaluationStatus = "Yes", Evaluation = "Experience1"))

Then put this code in the Visible property instead.  The 20 visible functions don't need to do any work because the calculation was already done when setting the variable.

varIsVisible

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