Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

Good morning!

I recently started using Power Automate and was designing my first flows with YouTube, so I am very new to it and would appreciate if someone more experienced than me had any input for my problem.

For the context, I have an Excel spreadsheet with four tabs. I want the entries of these tabs to be created, updated, or deleted in four different MS Lists, as they are modified in the Excel spreadsheet. So, I created four PowerAutomate flows (that are essentially the same, but connecting only one Excel tab with one MS List, respectively). Three of these flows work perfectly. However, the last one has been troubling me and I cannot figure out what the problem is. It is running but usually takes about 20 hours to complete any run, and sometimes doesn't run the "create" action. Furthermore, I received a warning by email that my "flow may be performing slow because it's running more actions than expected. Your flow will be turned off in 7 days if it does not use fewer actions."

The respective Excel table is in fact somewhat large, it has 150 rows and 18 rows, but could that really be the problem? I would imagine use cases for much larger sets of data to have been considered and tested, right?

I have tried troubleshooting with forum posts, YouTube videos, and Copilot, but cannot find any way for the flow to work. I disabled concurrency and set pagination to 200.

I have attached an image of the flow, and would be happy to provide any further details.

I would really appreciate input on any experience with this issue.

Thank you in advance!

Screenshot_3-12-2025_82621_make.powerautomate.com.jpeg

Categories:

Using flows

Hi @YK-03120715-0

The issue is your nested Apply To Each loops. In the outer-most loop (Apply To Each), it's running 151 times. Inside of that, you have a second loop (Apply To Each 1) that's running an unknown number of times (not listed in the screenshot), and inside of that you have a third loop (Apply To Each 2) that's running 151 times.

Remember that each inner loop will run the full number of times per run of the outer loop. So this means that, assuming the second loop is running only once, your Filter Array 1 action is running 151 x 151 times, or 22,801 times total. And that's just for one that action. If the second loop is running more than once, you'll multiply the number of times run by that number as well.

Try to avoid nesting loops to get around this issue.