Improve "local" pack performance

We use a coda doc to do some complex calculations, and as we need the results of each step of the calculation our column count started exponentially growing as we sometimes needed 3-4 of these calculations per row. This is why I created a pack which returns an object containing each step:

  • Results
    – Step 1
    – Step 2
    – etc…

The problem is that for maybe a hundred rows it will take 5-6 minutes to finish synchronising the pack. From what I’ve read here in various topics this is probably due to each formula being a single call, and the doc waiting for each one to finish. Caching helps, but sometimes randomly a bigger sync would trigger and no formula would be updated for a couple of minutes.

Since our pack is not fetching any data or doing anything async (the calculation is simple computationally but complex in coda script), it is really painful to use with these limitations.

The suggestion is to enable “utility” packs that don’t interact with any other services or fetch data to be enabled to either batch requests or to run in the browser itself like regular coda formulas so there isn’t such a big performance penalty.

This would make utility packs much more useful and usable.

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