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I have a flow that clears a list and repopulates it from a table. It all works but it is so slow
First step gets all the exising items in the list, about 250, takes a fraction of a second
Then there is a Apply to each step that deletes each item.
It takes over 3 minutes to delete 250 rows of data
3 minutes! Is it chiselling the data out on stone tablets?
Why is PowerAutomate so slow?
If you have premium licenses you can use (optionally batch) GRAPH requests to speed up the flow.
Are you sure? There are some not immediately obvious ways to restructure the data with Select actions, particularly with xpath.
And once you have the structure you want, you can use the API to upload the records in bulk like described here:
https://tachytelic.net/2021/06/power-automate-flow-batch-create-sharepoint-list-items/
If you can do it in Excel, do it in Excel! I had something that was taking hours to run in PowerAutomate. I modified the flow to call a TypeScript that processed the data in Excel, then copied the results across. It ran in seconds
So my flow ended up taking 44 minutes to run—to iterate a list of 111 items 3 times. Doing something similar in a VBA macro in Excel e.g. would take a few seconds I imagine (I hear what you're thinking...No). Just kind of shocked and frustrated that it takes so long. Looping is such a fundamental action. Will definitely be looking at ways to be more efficient (try to build everything into a single loop, e.g.).
Hi, thanks for your reply. I took a look at the Select action. Good to know about and thanks for suggesting, but I don't think it's going to work for me in this instance.
Thanks for your response. We do have premium licenses—is there some other kind of action (I'm using Apply to each that runs faster? And definitely I will be spending the week rebuilding and trying to optimize the flow.
1) Try to optimize the flow
2) Ask a customer if they ready to pay for Premium license to get the flow faster.
Am I ever feeling this pain. I'm creating a list of around 100 items, and iterating over it three times to perform data validation. Nothing complicated (if A > B then Valid = true). It's been running 38 minutes now. In production I'm expecting around 500 items. How am I going to tell a customer to run the flow and wait two hours for a result?
These are Power Automate template flows.
They aren’t something I expect every beginner to easily pick-up, but as a community we have done the best we can to make this as low-code as possible for everyone with the tools we have available.
You can use these, you can try putting in tickets/complaints to Microsoft to make official batch actions a higher priority, or you can purchase a more premium set-up like Dataverse where some batch actions are officially included.
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