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how can i make desktop flow faster

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Posted on by SR-10021045-0

Hi,

I have a cloud flow that calls 3 different desktop flows (one at a time). From start to end the cloud flow takes arround 4 minutes til run and i can see that most of the time is used on the 3 desktop flows. The desktop flows are running unattended.

1. The first desktop flow goes through an Excel document and extracts information from cells (i use desktop flow to do this because the document has macros enables)
2. The second desktop flow extracts images from the same excel document

3. The third Desktop flow takes the information from flow 1 and enters it into a legacy application that makes som calculations and returns some values.

Without me explaining the entire content of the desktop flow, can you please give me some pointers on how to make the cloud flow finish faster.
Also. can anyone tell me if there is a penalty on calling the 3 flows seperatly from the cloud flow (does it take som time to start the server each time or does it keep the server open between) and if so, how much time can i se by combining the desktop flows into one?

Thank you.

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Power Automate Desktop

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trice602 15,404 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Hi,

I don't know if there is anything specifically you can do to speed up this process and 4 minutes is not bad at all. The issue is in unattended, you have to log into each machine per flow and that process and take 45-90 seconds each (to go from Cloud to Desktop flow's 1st action). Here are three places to check though:

1) Check and see if there is anything in your flow that can be improved using process miner. You may find something in your flow that could be eliminated or improved.

2) In your machine settings, change the reuse sessions to Yes. This may eliminate 60 seconds per desktop flow run.

3) Since you have a working solution, look to Office Scripts to eliminate one or more of your desktop flows. While there is a learning curve there, you may be able to complete one or more of those tasks with Office Scripts and is a cloud flow action. My point is one task #1 above, you could be replicating that data into a non-macro workbook and eliminate desktop flow #1 with Office Scripts pretty quickly. On the images, if they are linked images in the worksheet, you can probably also eliminate the need to extract images with a desktop flow because you really only need the URL and they could get completed with a cloud action also. Task #3 needs to remain of course unless you have an API endpoint to use an HTTP request.

That said, great job! From my experience, your run time is in line with a lot of my flow runs and seems common to me. For unattended desktop flows, I aim for dependability and reliability over speed, 100% of the time.

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SR-10021045-0 8 on at

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Thank you @trice602. Your answer helped a lot. I ended up cutting of almost 2 minutes of runtime by reusing user sessions and restructuring my flow a bit. I choose to combine flow 1 and 2 as flow 2 extracted the image from the same excel file that was already open in flow 1.

I have one more question that i think you might be able to help me with. I can see that when i run my flow on my dev environment in attended mode, they run arround 30-40 seconds faster than when i run my flow in production where i run them unattended. Both servers should have the same hardware/performance. Shouldnt flow run faster in unattended mode?

Thank you!

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