What is "calculating" in my doc?

Hello everyone, any way of knowing what the doc is “calculating”. I have a couple of docs with many large tables and a lot of columns and formulas. About 10-15 people use and contribute to the documents daily. I have all my master tables filtered to show nothing. Since yesterday my doc is showing me the “calculating” message on top of my doc, but i can’t seem to find what is causing this.
What type of formulas need the most computing power so i can look for or find an alternative?
Any takes? thanks in advance

I have this exact same question.

Specifically, to what extent do these affect performance? Things that must be:

  • rendered in browser (columns, rows, grouping, etc)?
  • calculated in active browser tab, but NOT rendered (formulas, conditional formatting, etc that’s either way ABOVE or way BELOW the current user location on an active browser tab)?
  • calculated AND rendered in browser (conditional formatting, formulas, etc)?
  • calculated, but NOT rendered in browser (formulas in hidden columns, conditional formatting in hidden columns, formulas on other sections based on values changed in current section, etc)?

Lastly, what aspects of Coda drive CPU usage when a Coda browser tab is merely active, but the user is not interacting with that browser tab in any way?

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Hey @Adalberto_Santos_de_los_Santos thanks for the question & sorry about the slow response cc @Ander

Unfortunately there’s no way at the moment for users to see what’s “Calculating” in your doc.
However, if you do not have any sensitive data in your doc, could you share it with support@coda.io?
We have tools that allow us to look at what’s calculating slowly in a doc & I can also have someone from our engineering team look through to see if something else might be the problem.

I’m currently actively working on improving the performance of Coda docs, so it’s really helpful for us to see what kinds of issues users are seeing. It would be awesome if you can share your doc, but if not, it would be great if you can get on a video call or send us some more details about what kinds of interactions are slow.

Would really appreciate if you can message us on Intercom using the question mark button in Coda, and feel free to mention me directly.

Hey @Ander thanks for the question and sorry about the slow response.

Generally speaking, like you pointed out, performance issues are usually in one of 3 categories:

  1. rendering: This is related to what’s visible on the screen at any given time, and usually leads to a delay in scrolling or switching sections. The best way to fix these is by hiding the number of rows, columns, groups or views that are visible. You should see an improvement if you break up a big table into multiple views in different sections, disable grouping, filter out rows or hide columns you don’t need. Switching big tables to “Detail Layout” also can help with this a lot.

  2. calculation: This is related to formulas, filters, conditional formats etc. It’s hard to say what kinds of calculation issues you might be having since there’s a big range. We’ve sometimes been able to help customers fix certain formulas or schema to make the doc more performant or make other recommendations based on what is slow in the doc. All calculations take place on your local machine so pretty much any calculation that is running (in the background or not) takes resources on your CPU.

  3. memory: which usually leads to a doc crashing because it’s too big. This is less common but I think the best workaround for this is removing unnecessary columns and deleting or archiving old rows into a separate doc.

Hope this helps, but please feel free to message us in Intercom and mention me directly. Would be happy to look at specific docs or even jump on a video call if you like.

We’re also actively making improvements to all of these so you don’t need to resort to these workarounds. Hearing feedback from users is super helpful in prioritizing our efforts.

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For everyone watching this thread, we just made some announcements related to performance:

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This is a great tool thank you very much!! I just tried it and found out a few of my formulas are taking a long time to calculate, I shared one of my docs with support@coda.io to see if @Angad or someone could help me find an alternative since i have no idea on how to clean or simplify the formulas that are giving me problems @Mallikar suggested i post this on the community page so here it is.
The Doc name is “Dilesa” and the columns with the complicated formulas are on Table “Prototipos” and column names are “Costo MO” and Costo Materiales"
Document is in spanish
Thanks in advance!

Hey @Adalberto_Santos_de_los_Santos
Glad you were able to find the slow formulas in your doc.
Please take a look at this article to learn how to fix them: https://help.coda.io/articles/3082759-optimizing-slow-formulas-in-your-doc