PowerApps with satellite Internet Connection

[Churchy]

Hello PowerApps experts!

I'm looking for a little bit of advice / suggestions please.

I'm currently building an app, which is more or less finished. Its essentially a collection of about 10 forms, with a menu page that provide links to the 10 forms / respective galleries. The app is embedded within five different SharePoint sites, each of which passes a parameter back to the app so that depending on which site you are in, each form will connect to site specific datasource (in the main, SharePoint lists).

As a result of the above, I've got about 40-50 datasources within the app. I've read somewhere this is more than is recommended, however the app I have built is doing everything that I need it to do and the performance with a normal internet connection is good. 

The Problem

While I'm fairly happy with the app, the kicker here is that some of the users will be connecting to the SharePoint / App using a satellite internet connection.

When we've tested the app replicating the connection latency, it is taking in the region of 3-4mins to load (SharePoint itself is taking a couple of mins to load on the internet connection) which is a bit painful.

It should be noted that the above timings are once I have flushed the cache - if I let it cache, the performance (unsurprisingly) is significantly better.

The Question

Does anyone know if there is there anything I can do to enhance the performance of the app when considering a limited internet connection? I've tried using a "smaller" app containing less connections / removed any images, which is faster to load but its certainly not lightyears quicker. 

My gut suspicion here is there isn't much I can do (caching seems part of the answer but guessing I can't control that through powerapps?), however if anyone has any suggestions I've love to hear them!

[BCLS776]

Hopefully, several more community members will chime in here because there is a lot you can do in different ways to improve the performance of an app. First, though, open up a Monitor session and pay attention to data moving in and out of your app. Your data movements are restricted by bandwidth, so being as efficient with those as possible will matter. Things to pay attention to:

• Queries (Filters, lookups, searches, etc) that get repeated unneccesarily, or more frequently than UX demands
• Loading more columns from tables than needed to make the app work
• Failing to delegate operations to the server (a table filtered at the server is smaller than a table loaded and then filtered in the app)
• Controls, like dropdowns, that don't change, but end up querying the server for their Items multiple times
• Loading a file to the mobile device, only to send it out again some other way (these can often be automated with a flow)

Just a start, but hope it helps,

Bryan

[Churchy]

Hi Bryan

Thanks so much for the suggestions - that's some helpful pointers, I'm relatively new to PowerApps so I will bear them in mind.

In the main, I think my app is ok (My galleries contain only a few columns, I've delegated where possible, dropdowns are written into the forms etc), however I've not thought about actually monitoring the performance.

I have to be honest, I'm more of a BI developer (PBI, SQL server etc), so I know how I'd monitor those, but I'm not sure what tools I'd monitor an app with - would you recommend a specific tool for that? Or do you monitor through the browser tools?

Thanks

Nick

P.S. I'll mark your answer as the solution (My question is pretty open ended I guess!), but I'll wait a little bit to see if anyone has other pearls of wisdom first!

[BCLS776]

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@Churchy wrote:

I'm not sure what tools I'd monitor an app with - would you recommend a specific tool for that? Or do you monitor through the browser tools?

Thanks

Nick

Nick, there is a monitoring tool available within Power Apps that works wells. In the main screen, click on your app's name and press Monitor:

The tool will track user actions, timing, and data operations. Your app may be loading a lot more than you think it does.

Bryan

[Churchy]

Thanks again Bryan - I feel a bit of an idiot for missing that!! That's really helpful, but....

I assume you connect to the monitor session, then select the "Play Published App" option, play around with your app and come back to the monitor to see what has been going on?

Assuming that is correct, my app opens on the initial menu - all the forms / galleries are accessed via that menu. When I load the app for the first time, using the monitor I can only see two entries in the log (I have a test button in the menu that forces the parameter SharePoint passes, so 4 entries once I select that). Below is a screenshot of the timings I see:

Unfortunately, its this initial loading step that is taking about 4 mins to be returned when using the satellite connection (its basically worse than the good old dial up days!). Would I be correct to think that the above is telling me that there isn't much I can do to optimize my app given the bandwidth issues?

Once it has loaded, the forms seem to open ok and I'm able to create / update / edit reasonably quickly, but that initial step to load the app is rather painful. 

If I export the app, its roughly 4mb in size (I've got a number of flows connecting to it which are all packaged within it), I'm not sure if that represents the true size of what you open when you load the app for the first time, the only thing I could think to improve the initial load would be to reduce the size of the app but its pretty small already!!

Thanks for all your help to this point!

[BCLS776 · Accepted solution]

Yes, that 4mb app size is getting downloaded each time you launch the app, which is probably causing most of your delay. Your Monitor data so far indicates no large data transfers once the app is running.

A source of bloat in app size can come from embedded images and similar files. Check your media tab to make sure only what you need is included in the app package:

And keep in mind, for the "As-A-Service" model that functions on any mobile device or browser, Power Apps needs to download the app pretty much each time it is used. Very little persistence/caching due to it running as a web service. It can run better if you use the non-browser version (through the Power Apps app available for iOS or Android), since those are capable of launching while fully offline.

Bryan

Bryan

[Churchy]

Thanks for all your help Bryan - you've been super helpful.

I have got a couple of picture in the app so I might revisit and see if I can cut that down! I also wasn't aware of the offline version (Although I'm not sure that will work for me, but still very useful to know), so might take a look at that 🙂