Re: App Crashing in Chrome, Spreadsheets

Harshit_Goraya · 12-14-2021 03:38 AM

Hi there!

We developed and deployed a resource Management app for our organization on which we run fairly complex features (multiple bots, automations) for multiple end users. Since last week, users on Google Chrome are experiencing frequent browser crashes whereas the app is accessible on Mozilla Firefox at such times. We tried solutions that were posted on the Appsheet Forum (including clearing browser data, cookies and caches; opening the app in an incognito mode) but none seem to work. Attaching snapshot of the error messages below:

Parallelly, we also face an issue where our data source (google spreadsheet) stops to load and causes the app to crash as well. This only gets resolved if we close the spreadsheet on all systems.

These issues are turning out to be major roadblocks in our development and use of the App - we would really appreciate some help. Also grateful if anyone can direct us to the right person or team which might be able to address such issues.

Thank you.

SkrOYC

Which specs does your pc have? Chrome is memory-hungry

Harshit_Goraya

Hi, I’m on a i5 with 12 gigs of RAM and an SSD. However, the problem we’re facing is across multiple PCs with everyone failing to open the app on chrome.

SkrOYC

This seems to be a problem with Chrome, not AppSheet

Harshit_Goraya

Thanks for sharing the fix on GChrome issue. However, since it’d be hard to moderate such an issue for our dozens of end-users, is there anything we can do at the backend to solve it?

SkrOYC

About this though, how can you make a relationship between app crashing and GSheet? What makes you think that GSheet is not working?

Harshit_Goraya

Hi,
We get the following error on Gsheet which then stops the app from loading as well:

Error reads “Some tools might be unavailable due to heavy traffic in this file”.

Marc_Dillon

Do you have a lot of users directly accessing the GSheet file? If so, you need to try and move away from that. Build your data tools within your app, or another app.

You haven’t mentioned anything about the size of your data, like number of rows, etc. Did your app have slow performance before now at all, possibly from lots of virtual columns? What types of complexities do you have set up?

Harshit_Goraya

Thanks @Marc_Dillon

No, we’re only at 3-4 odd users using the Spreadsheet in the backend.

Number of sheets = 20
Number of rows = ~500 in each sheet
Number of columns = ~50 for each sheet
Brings the total cells to 25000.

Downloading the Spreadsheet as a .XLSX file shows a file size of 4.9 Mb.

We’re using very few virtual columns, only for concatenating fields for end-user view.
However, we have a lot of formulas in the ‘Auto-Compute’, ‘Data Validation’ and ‘Update Behavior’ sections.

The number of bots is about 20 (although they include dozens of tasks, processes, events).

We’ve observed a drop in performance (sync times, load times) as we have added more features to the app.

SkrOYC

Do you have users interacting with GSheets as well as users from the App?
Are there things that could be removed from the file that are not related to AppSheet?

BTW I use around 40 sheets on Excel and the biggest one has Over 2.000 rows and filesize doesn’t pass 500KB

Harshit_Goraya

The GSheet is only used by the admin users to monitor/update data at the backend

Many sheets are not being used directly by Appsheet, but we have formulas that are fetching information from those sheets. For example, Sheet A is connected to Appsheet but a field ‘Country’ in that sheet is Vlooking data from a Sheet B (which is not directly linked to Appsheet)

Most of our data is strings/date which might be causing the size to go way over. We’re also using a lot of importranges and queries to pull data from multiple sources into our backend Gsheet. However, this shouldn’t cause any problems in theory because the data size remains unaffected.

Marc_Dillon

I would guess that this is the source of your issues.

Harshit_Goraya

Thanks @Marc_Dillon. We’ll go ahead and try switching to static data to see how the app holds up in that case. However, can you suggest any alternative that one can use to importranges? Since we heavily rely on live data to flow in from our other systems and show up in the app.

SkrOYC

I guess you are trying to do something AppSheet isn’t supposed to do

Harshit_Goraya

Hi @SkrOYC. Can you please elaborate on that a bit? As in, does our backend data have to be static for Appsheet to smoothly run? Any documentation/info will be very helpful.

Right now we keep 1 primary key column in our sheet as static and have about 40 columns that are fetching formulated values basis that 1 static column.

SkrOYC

AppSheet expects you to interact with the database from inside your apps in my experience.
Even a supported stuff like Spreadsheet formulas are calculated just on serverside because of this, which for me is like a big poster saying “Don’t use them”.
I know certain cases need such expressions but in general you want all the logic stuff made through the App and it’s expressions from my POV.

Harshit_Goraya

Thanks @SkrOYC. Just one follow-up question:

We’ll have over 100k formulated values (2000 rows * 50 cols) if we chose to move our calculations to Appsheet from Spreadsheet formula. Have you seen any issues arise from such volume of formulas?

Marc_Dillon

I’d suggest a Google App Script that runs on a regular interval, to pull the exact same data as the importrange.

Harshit_Goraya

Thanks @Marc_Dillon. We’ll be making this switch - we plan on leveraging AppsScript with BQ to transfer the data from multiple sources into our Appsheet backend spreadsheet. Hoping for the best

Marc_Dillon

Cool. What’s BQ?

Harshit_Goraya

BigQuery

Steve

Consider moving your data to a database. Google Sheets clearly isn’t suited for your app.

Koichi_Tsuji

This screenshot does not look like Google Spreadsheet, if i m not wrong.

Looks like old stype of Google produce or other one from other platform or application.

Harshit_Goraya

Hi @tsuji_koichi, this is how a Google Spreadsheet opens up if it’s under heavy load - all features get disabled and we’re only allowed to view the data in a very HTML-esque format.

We too discovered this side of sheets recently, with our Appsheet backend.

Koichi_Tsuji

I never see such before with Google spreadsheet.
Worth asking Google Workspace help desk instead of Appsheet to see why you see such.

Harshit_Goraya

Thanks @Steve. We are planning to move to the enterprise plan and move our data to CloudSQL. However, we’re unsure whether that will fix the Google Chrome issue. Also, can you please let me know if automations/bots run smoother on a DB backend than a GSheet one?

Koichi_Tsuji

Why you take automation as source of your problem ?

Harshit_Goraya

Hi @tsuji_koichi - we started our development with a very basic version of the application and then started adding features. We did not face any problems during the initial days, but as we ramped up, we faced such issues. Hence we’re unsure if our development (adding of bots, tasks, events) might be causing any issues.

Koichi_Tsuji

I agree automation is always funky with Appsheet. Better to take normal debug process to see what happens with your app if we disable bot etc to sorrow the possible root cause of your problem . We do always.

Harshit_Goraya

Thanks @tsuji_koichi. We’ll try to dig further and see if any particular bots might be the cause.

One question - We found the below information here:

Do not build an AppSheet app against a huge data set. What is “huge”? For an AppSheet app, the compressed data size limit is 5MB or 10MB (depending on the device) for all the data in one app.

Is this also applicable against a SQL data source? We’re unsure if 5-10MB will accommodate our requirement from the app as we scale further.