Calculations - Reliability & Performance
Dear Podio Users,
After receiving special attention the last few months, calculations should in average be faster and more reliable for you. Here is what we did:
Reliability - Podio calculations are powerful and we have a huge amount of calculations running every single day, however we understand they do not always have the expected reliability, which could sometimes cause a calculation not to trigger or "get stuck". We have spent dedicated time improving the architecture to avoid these issues better, and as result we see a 90 % reduction of error rates in our systems.
Speed & Performance - After reducing calculation errors, our next objective was to reduce calculation delays.
We classify calculation requests into 2 types:
- Standard Calculations: Calculations on less than 1000 items (75% of the requests we receive are of this type)
- Bulk Calculations: Calculations on more than 1000 items (25% of the requests we receive are of this type)
To start with, we have made architectural changes to process standard calculations and bulk calculations separately. This will save our users from bad neighbour effect where User 1's bulk recalculations occupy resources leading to delay in User 2's smaller recalculations. Now, recalculations on less than 1000 items will not have to wait for bulk recalculations to finish.
With this change, the calculation time has significantly reduced by 92% for requests with less than 1000 items.
While we understand that this change will not help users with Bulk calculations, we have concrete plans of scaling our infrastructure to take this up. But it will be a much larger effort, so hold on till we get bigger and better improvements to you soon!
Thanks for your support and patience helping us improve.
//Sumedha - Podio Product Manager
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As a person who spends every waking hour in Podio, I am definitely sensitive to the nature of calculation fields, and I can say for certain that the "short haul" variety of calcs have seen a SIGNIFICANT improvement over the past short while, and it's made using things like markdown tables much more efficient. Thank you to the dev and product teams for all your hard work!
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Mark Cannon To clarify your question, the calculation delays should now be less for requests with less than 1000 calculations. When we say calculation, it means one change in a single field, like you rightly put.
We have improvements for Bulk calculations also in the pipeline! Stay tuned.
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Thank you, Sumedha and the entire team! We have been looking forward to improved reliability and speed in our calculations. Because most of our most-used apps contain more than 1000 items, we also are looking forward to your upcoming improvements for those calculations for more than 1000 items.
In fact, if you could clarify for me, is the 1000 limit on calculations for any app having 1000 items? The follow-on question is whether this limit is when calculations occur as one change in a a single field is made for a single app item in an app having 1000 items or only when the template is Modified for a given app that is 1000 items? -
I'm sure this is the case for a lot of customers but some of the viewing and filtering limitations mean an excess use of calculations where it's not really the design purpose.
We've had to use calculations in order to pull data in from other related apps. This is no doubt costing you in storage and performance, duplication isn't a good thing.For example we want to display a contacts email address in the table view of businesses and for excel exports.
The only way to do this is to create a calculation field in businesses and pull the email from the related contact/s into that field. This is the same for every field you wish to include in an excel export or display on the listing page.In a normal database you would be able to select fields from relations in a query, you'd also be able to filter on things that are not containing, do not equal etc. Podio really lacks in this department.
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