In this post, I'd like to summarize some points about performance that have been made in the past and ask for some clarification about the third type of performance issue -- energy consumption (battery drain, smartphone heating up, etc.).
First, in regard to the distinction between syncing performance and rendering (or interactive) performance, Praveen (@pravse ) responded to a post of mine as follows last year:
"Rendering performance is really about what we ask the device/browser to do when a users taps on something or scrolls something. The processor on a device is slow and if you ask it to do a lot of computation, it will make the UI feel โsluggishโ (takes a noticeable time for a UI response). Expensive format rules fall in this category, as do expensive searches, as you point out. Also, if you had a very large data set and open a view on it, it could be slow if all the data has to be processed in some way."
https://www.googlecloudcommunity.com/gc/AppSheet-Q-A/Disabled-expensive-Format-rules-vs-performance/...
And, in regard to battery consumption, Praveen wrote as follows in another thread:
"Battery drain would occur if the app is trying to connect to the network to sync in the background.
Can you disable background sync totally (just enable Delayed Sync) to see if this helps?"
https://www.googlecloudcommunity.com/gc/AppSheet-Q-A/Battery-Drain-One-of-my-pilot-users-is-indi/m-p...
Here's my situation:
My rather large app (which I've been tweaking for several years now, adding functions, etc.) works quite well both in terms of syncing performance and rendering performance. The problem I've noticed recently is that it seems to be a power hog on my phone. It's an app for studying vocabularly and I wound up using it to pass the time on a long train trip recently. The phone became quite warm as I used it and the battery usage display indicated that AppSheet was using about 80% of the power on the phone. In the case of this app, it's really necessary to keep background syncing on because using the app involves frequent writing to the sheet and not having background syncing on would mean accumulating a large backlog of data to sync. I don't want to make users have to wait for such a sync.
Here's my question:
Are there other factors that may be contributing to energy consumption? I have virtual columns in a sheet with several thousand rows. Those columns are relatively simple (no SELECT expressions, etc.) but they don't need to be recalculated so I could fix the app to have them written to the sheet, if that would help.
And one related question:
I'm one of a group of people who have asked about "background background syncing," that is, background syncing that continues when you are using a different app on your device:
https://www.googlecloudcommunity.com/gc/Feature-Ideas/Background-background-syncing/idi-p/304214
I wonder if such improved syncing is in the works and if anyone is looking into making background syncing less energy intensive.
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