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My Power Automate Desktop flow is responding too slowly

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Posted on by donaldekpe

The desktop flow I am working on has 10 subflows with each having up to 891 lines of actions, many Elements as well. The thing is PAD seems to respond too slowly to anything I do on this flow from adding an action to even editing and saving actions. It goes into this state where everything freezes up and the mouse cursor changes into a blue circle like it is finding it hard to process, then it says "Power Automate Not Responding".

My laptop runs on windows 10 pro with 16GB of RAM. Should the number of actions and elements I mentioned above be enough to slow down PAD on a PC with such specs? If this is normal, is there anything I can do to deal with this? It is really frustrating having to wait about a minute for every action I take to process.

I do not know anything about Javascript but can using javascript for most of the actions and then deleting the corresponding elements help to speed things up?

Screenshot below

Screenshot (2).jpg

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Power Automate Desktop

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Henrik_M 2,021 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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Yep, sounds about right 🤐

I am guessing you have a ton of UI elements? One solution you might be able to look into is to take each of your 10 subflows, then run them through Notepad++ (or other editor that can find and replace text with regular expressions) and remove the encoded UI images from flow.

If you can reduce every ScreenShot value to *nothing*, your editor might start running faster. But I don't know. This technique has the drawback of removing the images shown at the bottom of your UI elements section, though...

Before:

After:

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donaldekpe 65 on at

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Thank you for the response. I suspected that I would have change a lot of things to javascript. I just had to confirm first or at least get another solution.

I may have to open another question on the forum to help guide me on how to run these javascripts, cause like I said, I know very little about it.

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Henrik_M 2,021 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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The method I mention isn't JavaScript, it is where you select all your actions, then copy them to Notepad++ where they will then appear as text. After modifying the text correctly and deleting the UI element, you can copy it back into PAD to replace the old actions and UI elemetns. It is cumbersome, and I don't even know if it will make a difference.

BUT: Using few JavaScript instead of many PAD actions should definitely speed things up.

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donaldekpe 65 on at

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Oh, just checked your comments again. I really didn't know I could delete the screenshots. I don't mind getting rid of the screenshots, so I will give that a try and see how it goes. Thank you.

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donaldekpe 65 on at

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I tried your method, but PAD won't let me paste the modified text back into it. Is it really possible to delete the UI Element screenshots?

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momlo 1,527 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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Hey!
You need to delete the entire "screenshot" tag to make PAD accept the code back.

Take a look at my thread where I was looking after a way to delete ui images in the case they would store some sensitive info:

https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Automate-Desktop/Disable-UI-element-image-delete-all-UI-images/m-p/1797926#M18686

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donaldekpe 65 on at

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Thank you. That worked.

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BoredFish 26 on at

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Deleting the encoded screenshot data from Desktop Flows does help with performance, especially if you use a lot of UI elements. Here's how I get rid of them:

Remove Screenshot Encoding from Flow Actions:

Edit the Flow and open each Subflow tab that uses UI elements.

One Subflow at a time, select all of its Actions and then copy (Ctrl+A then Ctrl+C), and paste each one individually into blank Notepad++ documents making sure each one is in it's own tab and no other files are open in Notepad++.

In the Notepad++ editor, use the Replace (Ctrl+H) function to replace the encoded screenshots using the following search string.

In the Replace window, put the following RegEx in the Find what box:

(?<=ScreenShot\\\":\s)(\\\".*?\\\")(?=,\\r\\n)

In the Replace with box, put:

null

At the bottom of the Replace window, select Regular expression in the Search Mode options.

Then choose Replace All in All Opened Documents.

Remove Screenshot Leftovers:

Before transferring all the Actions from Notepad++ back into the Subflows, first delete all the original Actions in the Subflow itself (Ctrl+A then Del).

On the right side of the Flow editor, navigate to the list of UI elements, click on the three-dot-menu button right of the blue Add UI element button and select Remove unused UI elements.

If they did not all get deleted, then you still have Actions somewhere in your Flow that are linked to the UI elements that didn't delete. It's important to go find those Actions and delete them, then repeat Step 5 again. If you leave any of them in there, then you have only succeeded in deleting the references to them, not the actual images themselves.

Finally, copy and paste your Actions back into their Subflows from Notepad++. The UI elements will be automatically added back into the Flow but without the screenshot image or data with it.

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