Hey all,
I think this is mostly for Coda devs. I’m wondering why my automation, that is set to run every 2 hours, is causing a big slowdown in my project? I am updating a title of a project in my project management doc, and the calculation is taking multiple seconds but I feel like it shouldn’t? There isn’t any if statement or anything in the automation, and even if there is, I don’t see why a change in a cell would cause a recalculation of any sort beyond the 2 hour trigger?
Impossible to say much about your situation without seeing the doc.
There could easily be calculation intensive cascades triggered by changing just one cell if there are many doc dependencies tied to that one cell. This is one of the primary considerations when optimizing docs for performance.
I guess my point is that it actually shouldn’t matter. The automation itself is ran every 2 hours, it shouldn’t do anything beyond running those two hours. I think the backend for Coda itself should make sure to not calculate anything beyond that.
For example here, I do have a bunch of buttons I push. I could see that changing the name would cause a cascade that would attribute calculation time to the button itself, but the automation should stay idle until the 2 hour mark.
I don’t understand your issue. Your screenshot shows that it’s running for 5s. Are you saying that the Automation is being triggered randomly at times other than 2 hour intervals?
Correct! It is being triggered by a change in a cell value
I’ve never seen that behavior.
It could be that the change you’re making affects dependencies used in the Automation formula, and so the Automation formula is updating itself to reflect the change so that it will be ready to run at the next interval, and is therefore captured as such in the ‘Debug calculations’ screen.
That’s just speculation though.
I defer to the experts.
Yea totally believe that it’s likely a button updating. There is no “IF” statement in the automation itself, so if it is the button updating, the debug should point to the button but not the automation. But that also makes little sense, because if it were a button within the automation, I’d expect to see that button also listed in the debug trail and it isn’t there
