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Power Platform Community / Forums / Power Automate / Why is PowerAutomate s...
Power Automate
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Why is PowerAutomate so slow?

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Posted on by Guy Boswell 234

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?

Categories:
Building flows
I have the same question (0)
  • RobElliott Profile Picture
    RobElliott 10,323 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

    You can speed it up by following the process here.

     

    Rob
    Los Gallardos
    If I've answered your question or solved your problem, please mark this question as answered. This helps others who have the same question find a solution quickly via the forum search. If you liked my response, please consider giving it a thumbs up. Thanks.

  • Guy Boswell Profile Picture
    Guy Boswell 234 on at

    Might be quicker but sure is ugly way to just delete rows!!!   Why is something so simple made sooooo difficult?

    How long does it take to delete 500 rows manually?  Seconds!  So why does it take so much longer to do it using Power Automate?  It just isn't good enough

  • RobElliott Profile Picture
    RobElliott 10,323 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

    Because every request in the apply to each is a new api call that needs to run separately. It might be quicker for you just to delete all the rows in bulk in the list itself which doesn't use up any of your api calls.

  • Guy Boswell Profile Picture
    Guy Boswell 234 on at

    How?

  • Guy Boswell Profile Picture
    Guy Boswell 234 on at

    But that isn't really the point.  Because the next stage of the process is to write data back in to the list.  And that also takes far to long

  • RobElliott Profile Picture
    RobElliott 10,323 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

    How? Select all rows from the radio button next to the the title column at the top of the list and click delete!

     

    Short of you building your own program to do it faster I can't add anything more.

     

    Rob
    Los Gallardos
    Intranet, SharePoint and Power Platform Manager (and classic 1967 Morris Traveller driver)

  • takolota1 Profile Picture
    takolota1 4,974 Moderator on at

    @GuyBoswell @RobElliott 

     

    There is also a batch create using basically the same method…

    https://www.tachytelic.net/2021/06/power-automate-flow-batch-create-sharepoint-list-items/?amp

    Or if you just want to directly go to updating the rows, then there is a batch set-up for that too

    https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Automate-Cookbook/Batch-Update-SharePoint-List-With-External-Data/td-p/1365410

  • Guy Boswell Profile Picture
    Guy Boswell 234 on at

    So no Power Automate method

  • takolota1 Profile Picture
    takolota1 4,974 Moderator on at

    @GuyBoswell 

     

    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.

  • JB-26112252-0 Profile Picture
    JB-26112252-0 on at

    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? 

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