5 Reasons Your Quickbase Apps are Slow (and what to do about it)

Quickbase is a fantastic platform. 

Most of the time, in organizations Quickbase begins as a single app, and gets bigger and bigger as more and more people use it, and more apps are built. 

While growth is great, the downside can be slower apps, outages, and user dissatisfaction if routine performance assessment and tweaking are not undertaken. 

Below are 5 reasons your Quickbase apps are slowing down, and what you can do about it. 

Start Here: 

To begin with, it’s critical to measure performance before you begin your work - to help determine where the bottlenecks are and quantify success as performance work is started. It’s not enough to do it once - you should measure latency throughout the day and log the results to get a sense of performance hour-by-hour throughout the day. 

The good news is there are numerous tools available that can open a QB session, perform a series of tasks (run reports, add records, etc.), log how long it took to finish, then log out. 

Simply create an action that runs once per hour and logs how long the process took from start to finish. 

This can also be done with Pipelines or Zapier. 

Reason 1: Cross App Relationships 

All QB apps run in a “container”. When an app has cross-app relationships (the “main app”), cross-app relationships cause all other QB apps referenced to load in the same container as the “main app”.  Instead of a single app (the “main app”) loading and running, cross-app relationships can drag 1, 2 or 20 additional apps into the same virtual container. 

This can dramatically affect performance. 

Below is a quick way to determine if an app has cross-app relationships: 

Let’s say your main app URL looks like the one below when you are at the main dashboard for your app (click “Home” on the far left).

 “https://abccompany.quickbase.com/db/b87tw78” 

Step 1: Determine your QB “Host”. In this case, the host is “abccompany”. 

Step 2: Determine your app’s “APPID”. In this case, the APPID is “b87tw78”. 

Step 3: On any dashboard in your app, create a button bar, with a new URL button. Using our example above, the URL would look like this (substitute your data): https://abccompany.quickbase.com/db/b87tw78?a=ListExternalDependencies 

This will display all dependencies that can affect performance. 

Reason 2: Searchable Fields

Think of each searchable field as a field that generates its own little dynamic table or queue of data in the background so it can be searched by QB behind the scenes. 

This creates significant overhead in the background and can slow performance dramatically. If you have 5 searchable fields in a table, that’s 5 dynamic tables or queues. If you have 100, well…

To see which fields are searchable, and manage them, do the following: 

1. Select a table in the table bar and select “Fields” in the left menu. 

2. Click the “Advanced Options” link on the upper right of the screen. 

3. Check the “Searchable” box and click “Save”. This will show you all the “searchable” fields in that table. 

4. Click the green check to the right of any field to turn off the searchable attribute. Keep in mind that removing the “Searchable” attribute will affect whether the field can be searched in a report or a report filter. 

Reason 3: Reports Everywhere

Think of reports in Quickbase as queries. 

Every time a report is executed, it executes a query against its table. With 10 users, this does not usually affect performance. With 100, 300, or 500 users this can dramatically affect performance. 

In many cases, when a user opens an edit or view record form, there can be 1 (or 5, or 10) embedded reports in that form. 500 users x 10 tables in a form = 5,000 queries. 

To begin with, it’s important to ensure the “Load all embedded reports on a form when the form loads” is unchecked. 

This setting can be accessed in the “App Properties” section of the application (Home> Settings Gear > App Properties > Advanced Settings). Setting this to unchecked implements “lazy load”. IOW, the reports do not load until the user scrolls to where they are on the form. You can see the reports that are most used by (Home> Settings Gear > App Management > Manage Reports). When the “Manage Reports” is available, click on the “Used Count” to list the most used reports at the top. This will tell you which reports are most heavily used and may indicate they’re being opened more often than they need to be. 

The strategy should be to reduce the number of reports contained in QB forms. Often, hiding a report behind a button rather than displaying it by default makes sense. 

Reason 4: Fields, Fields, and More Fields

The more fields on a form or report, the more effort Quickbase expends opening the form. Nuff said. 

Reason 5: Sloppy Architecture

How your apps are built also plays a huge role in their performance. 

Summary:

There are many more ways to speed up your Quickbase app, and we’d be glad to lend a hand. 

We’ve got 16 years of Quickbase experience building and rebuilding apps focusing on performance, scalability, and security. Check out our website at: low-coders.com 

More information on performance is also available in this Quickbase article: https://helpv2.quickbase.com/hc/en-us/articles/4570366376596-Analyzing-performance-of-apps