Slow performance in Power Apps Studio when building large apps

[mwbyrtie]

TRYING TO RAISE SOME ATTENTION FROM MICROSOFT HERE

... so please add a comment, if you face a similar issue.

Let's rally and make some noise!

ISSUE

When building large apps, Power Apps Studio (i.e. the editor) becomes insanely sluggish when the number of screens/controls increases. 

I am currently building an canvas application with more than 100 screens, which works perfect in player-mode - but my ability to proceed with the development is heavily impeded poor performance in the editor (Power Apps Studio).

EXAMPLES OF PERFORMANCE ISSUES

• Loading the app in the editor takes 15-20 minutes (and is interrupted by an authentication prompt).
• When an object is selected, it takes 4-5 seconds before the formula bar is adjusted to the correct code.
• When a formula is entered, at it takes 10-30 seconds before an intellisense-suggestion appears.
• Inserting object takes 5-10 seconds (a loading screen appears).
• Opening "Preview mode" takes 2-5 minutes.

MICROSOFT

To any Microsoft support staff reading this - you have a problem, which cuts off developers ability to build some serious apps, that actually can be used for more than just handle a simple process. Please fix this.

Many before me have raised this issue - here's 15 examples from a "Power Apps Studio Slow"-google search, where I only looked at the first 3 pages:

• https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Building-Power-Apps/App-loading-in-Studio-incredibly-slow-today-...
• https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Building-Power-Apps/PowerApps-super-slow-when-editing/m-p/398393
• https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Building-Power-Apps/PowerApps-project-runs-very-slow/td-p/824328
• https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Building-Power-Apps/Power-Apps-SLOW/m-p/240137/highlight/true#M7...
• https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Building-Power-Apps/PowerApps-VERY-SLOW-When-Editing/td-p/322028
• https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Building-Power-Apps/Is-anyone-experiencing-some-real-slow-perfor...
• https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Building-Power-Apps/POwerapps-performing-way-too-slow/td-p/52609...
• https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Building-Power-Apps/Editing-a-slow-loading-app-can-break-the-stu...
• https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Building-Power-Apps/Extremly-slow-performance-PA-studio-UI-unacc...
• https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Building-Power-Apps/Extremely-slow/td-p/50434
• https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Building-Power-Apps/PowerApps-is-running-extremely-slow/m-p/1843...
• https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Building-Power-Apps/PowerApps-is-Slow-not-saving-and-Hanging-now...
• https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Building-Power-Apps/PowerApps-Slow-Performance/td-p/845323
• https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Building-Power-Apps/PowerApps-Editing-Environment-Laggy-Buggy/td...

I have even raised a ticket to your support staff... to which the response was - "Try to delete some of your screens".

... c'mon - get in the game, please!

[Ishai]

@microsoftare ignoring this issue for some reason. I always assumed this issue is due to the size of the last app I developed, but it is appearing almost instantly as I start a new app.

I created an app with 2 pages, each with 2 controls. One of those controls (on each page) is a custom component that has 7 controls in it - all buttons and icons. So even if you calculate the maximum amount of controls, this app has 2*7+2 = 16 controls.

And I cannot type in a formula without getting only half of what I typed being captured!

I typed :

If(btnNavLevel2.Visible,DisplayMode.Edit,DisplayMode.View)

and it was looking good, but the button was showing an error. click on another button and back to this one, and you get:

If(btnNavLevel2.Visible,DisplayMode.Edit,

Before they blame the hardware, I would point out that their minimums are VERY small (8gb ram is what I can find) and my laptop may be old, but it has 16GB ram and a core i7 cpu. They say you can use the editor on tablets - but it is impossible to use on a (lightweight) dev laptop!

How are people using the development interface with any kind of efficiency and without breaking a keyboard in frustration every day? Do some people not get this error? how come? is it dependent on where you are in the world?

*rant over*

[daniel_costanza]

I am facing the same issue. There should be an option to disable App Checker's Checking. It's really frustrating and delays lots of work. 

[HEATFreight]

You may have too much logic that depends on web requests and lengthy synchronous calculations.

I have an extremely large canvas app and am no longer seeing issues with the editor running extremely slowly. They have made a lot of changes in recent months. It looks like the Power Apps team is doing a ground-up rebuild, or at least refreshing a significant portion of the editor interface.

Suffice it to say that if you are still having issues with the editor running slowly, you should consider investigating if your logic is to blame. Typically, you should not be making lots of web requests to display static data. External requests and lengthy sequential calculations should be placed in buttons or otherwise triggered by user input, as opposed to, for instance, placing such logic in the controls of a gallery.

If you have gallery controls that must make web requests in order to be displayed (rather than the request being made directly in a button click), well that was one thing that massively slowed down my editor when I was new to Power Apps.

But even once I had gotten a lot better about following the best practices for canvas apps, there was a long time where I still dealt extensively with extremely laggy performance in the editor. For me, that issue is completely gone.

For what it's worth, my canvas app is about 8 pages where every page has 300 to 500 or more controls. Every page has a "too many controls on this page" warning. But editor is as snappy as it ever was!

[pp_dev]

@IshaiI agree with you. The entire development experience with Power Apps and Power Automate was a waste of time for me. The whole platform is very slow.🐌

[carl1to]

Same problem here. The apps are not that big (one screen, 1 Form, some buttons and labels)

This is really annoying!

[Usernametwice23]

Did this ever get resolved? It's now 2024 and my organization is considering PowerApps, but the app would be complex and possibly 20-30 screens...  Not sure if we should consider other options reading this post. 

[CB_Tech]

None of my apps are 20-30 screens, however I have seen huge improvements in the last year or so. The app that used to take several minutes to open and make edits, now works normally. One thing I would suggest is to research Microsoft's suggested app settings because I know these can make a difference.  Best of luck to you.

[robertjl]

Hi @Usernametwice23 

I can only speak from my experience ... similar to what @HEATFreight stated a few posts ago, the speed of your app editing (and playing) experience greatly depends on design.  Repeated calls to data sources, numerous variables and collections with thousands of rows, formulas w/ hundreds or thousands of lines of code (referencing those data sources or local collections) ... all make for a pretty "laggy" app.  My apps work way faster these days due in part to Microsoft's improvements, but also due to me maturing as a "maker"/developer.

Whether or not you invest in PowerApps or should depend on your use case.  20-30 screens itself isn't a deal-breaker.   Just as important are your back-end data sources (Excel, SharePoint, Dataverse, SQL, etc.?), how numerous or big they are (hundreds, thousands, millions of rows?), how often you're making calls to them, and what you do with all that data once it's in your app (i.e. numerous or complex formulas relying on hundreds or thousands of lines of code).  PowerApps is appropriate for departmental, and maybe some limited enterprise-wide, business processes.  I'd be leery of using it for more than that (at this point in its evolution).  IMHO.

Good luck!