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Extremely Slow Performance in Flow Designer When Working With Large Flows

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Posted on by JoshAtBrotech

Hello Microsoft & the Power Automate Community,

These past couple months, my knowledge of Power Automate and my and ability to use it has expanded rapidly, allowing for our organization to take advantage of Power Automate in ways we were incapable of imagining at the beginning of 2020. It has truly been a fulfilling challenge to learn and use Power Automate.

Lately, I have been working on Flows that will automate business processes that are large in scope, requiring larger Flows with more Action Cards.

Microsoft advertises that Power Automate can handle up to 500 Action Cards in a single Flow, meaning that the product is capable of handling larger Flows.

However, I have noticed that, as the number of Action Cards increases, the performance of the Flow Designer for that specific Flow decreases.

I have a Flow that I have been working on that has approximately 200 Action Cards - so, not even half of the advertised Action Cards per Flow capacity of the Product.

However, at this point, I am essentially incapable of doing additional work on the Flow.

Clicking + New Step results in a lengthy load time, some times several minutes, before I can select which Action Card I want to add, followed by another lengthy load time before the Action Card becomes editable, sometimes with additional lengthy load times while editing, depending on the Action Card being used (Update a Row in an Excel Table, for example, requires another lengthy load time after selecting the Key Column and Key Value).

In my internet sleuthing, I can see similar issues reported since 2017.

My question to Microsoft and the Power Automate team is, what are my real solutions here?

In the Power Platform Admin Center, our organization's Environment Capacity page shows %87.21 of Database available, & 98.24% of File available, indicating no issues there.

The issue persists across multiple browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Edge), indicating that the issue is not specific to a browser.

The issue is not present when editing a smaller flow with fewer Action Cards, indicating that the poor performance is specific to larger Flows with more Action Cards, indicating that the issues is specific to the Product.

I do not believe that splitting the Flow into "two flows" is a real solution, as this requires some sloppy dumpage of variables into one location so they can be extracted & communicated in a "part two" of the Flow.

Are there, perhaps, settings, either specific to Flow or to a browser or to the Microsoft Firewall or Microsoft Security settings that can be adjusted to alleviate these issues?

Any insight that Microsoft or the Power Automate Community can provide is greatly appreciated.

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Perry H 14 on at

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Re: Extremely Slow Performance in Flow Designer When Working With Large Flows

It's been so disappointing to use the new editor. It seems like it was designed by someone who does not use Power Automate on a daily basis. I'd have wanted to be able to like pin/favorite the steps I use the most - we still don't have that. but I did see they're going to enable drafting - that MAY be a benefit if we're able to call previous versions.. but I've not seen THAT function yet. otherwise, it's incredibly clunky to use - and I switch back to classic whenever I can, but I know my time is limited 😞
Siva Tanguturi 6 on at

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Re: Extremely Slow Performance in Flow Designer When Working With Large Flows

I do have the same issue with flow designer while working with bigger flow and I observed issue is happening if the action has many attributes. Else it's looking OK. I am afraid of using new designer as it never set my expectations in performance and it's so disappointing and had to switch back to classic mode.
D_Clarke 9 on at

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Re: Extremely Slow Performance in Flow Designer When Working With Large Flows

With the method above a child flow with a hundred or so steps in it can have three steps in the calling parent flow : 1) to compose an input text from variables, 2) To run the child flow, 3) To parse the output.
If like me you have a solution with one parent flow calling 5 child flows that is potentially 500 steps replaced by 15.
D_Clarke 9 on at

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Re: Extremely Slow Performance in Flow Designer When Working With Large Flows

It just means if you are breaking the flow into a parent and several child flows you get less steps per flow and that is quicker in the designer as it does not consider the steps in the child flows when doing a save or check.
VictorIvanidze 12,484 on at

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Re: Extremely Slow Performance in Flow Designer When Working With Large Flows

Hi @D_Clarke,
how your "solution" can speed up the flow designer?
D_Clarke 9 on at

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Re: Extremely Slow Performance in Flow Designer When Working With Large Flows

I do tend to create a solution with the main flow calling child flows to do things that keeps the flows a bit smaller.
It does mean you have to send parameters to the child flow in place of variables.

To save the effort of defining all the variables again in a child flow I use a text input to do a lot of work, i.e. I have a compose action before I call the Child flow and that contains a string that resembles a dummy json file but with the quotes replaced by a **.
e.g
**Var1**:**Value1**,
**Var2**:**Value2**,
**VarX**:**ValueX**

(NB You have to replace any quotes in the values and surround any * from the values with something like a dash to prevent it failing)

This then is read by the child flow as an text input and the first step is to use Parse Json (Say called I)with the content as:
Concat('{',Replace(triggerBody()['text'],'**','"'),'}')
and the schema:
{
"type": "object",
"properties": {
"Var1": {
"type": "string"
},
"Var2": {
"type": "string"
},
"VarX": {
"type": "string"
}
}
}
I then call the values body('I')?('Var1') where needed and populate files or other variables as needed in the child flow. Any changes to the variable values input can be passed back to the main flow using the opposite process. Using a compose to gather all the changed ones into a ** delimited string and pass that into the output step. The Main flow can then use a parse json to read that and apply the values to update variables or better still if the design is right use be used as the input for sequential child flows that will run depending on what happens in the previous child flows.
D_Clarke 9 on at

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Re: Extremely Slow Performance in Flow Designer When Working With Large Flows

The Performance is bad when opening the dynamic content on the new version and it sometimes makes things disappear.
maxpower45255 223 on at

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Re: Extremely Slow Performance in Flow Designer When Working With Large Flows

oh no! I haven't used it until today. So I can't say. I hope they improve the UI though. It's so hard to read with all the rounded border lines. I think the main problem is it's stretching too tall. Before, the actions were shorter in height and more compact. The new layout makes them narrower and taller. I don't know, maybe I'll get over it after using it for a few months.
Perry H 14 on at

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Re: Extremely Slow Performance in Flow Designer When Working With Large Flows

Funny you say that! my new designer is terrible, it locks up and causes more issues than the classic version. I'll be heartbroken when they take away the ability to switch between 😞
maxpower45255 223 on at

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Re: Extremely Slow Performance in Flow Designer When Working With Large Flows

There is a new version of the designer that makes the popup not display automatically. You have to click the 'electric shock' icon before it pops up. This feature has improved the designer performance drastically. I have just spent the last 2hrs literally waiting 20-30secs for the popup to appear each time I switch to a field. I restarted Edge and cleared the cache, but to no avail. I was ready to put a ticket in before deciding to try the new designer.
Although I'm still not too fond of this new designer, I do like the performance improvements with this new feature. I didn't see any prior performance issues with the old power automate designer until recently. It could be that more user adoption is putting more load on the platform. Or, maybe MSFT is pulling the Apple trick to get people off of the iPhone 4? lol. Nah, I don't believe that.

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