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Anonymous
Not applicable

How to optimize my specific flow execution duration ?

Hello everyone !

 

I searched for a way to reduce my flow's execution duration but I did not really find helpful answers set for my particular case.

 

Here is the scenario :

Under Sharepoint online, a user publish and promote a Site Page on the Group's Intranet. He/she then launches the flow with the convenient Flow button. The flow will copy this specific page to a defined list of countries SP sites, promote them to news, add some managed metadatas in a column and publish it.

Concrete example : I create a group News (like "SuperBig wishes you a happy new year") on superbig.sharepoint.com/sites/GroupIntranet, I promote it and publish it. Then i'll launch the flow. It will copy this page to the 25 english speaking countries's sites (superbig.sharepoint.com/sites/USAIntranet , superbig.sharepoint.com/sites/AustraliaIntranet, etc) and promote, add the right metadatas and publish it.

The flow takes 2 min for only 3 sites URL. But we'll have, in the end, approx. 25 sites. So i know (and hope) I can optimize this time.

 

Configuration : each Site (GroupIntranet, USAIntranet, AustraliaIntranet and so on) has a SitePages library, and on each of them, there is a particular column created : a multivalued managed metadata column plugged to a TermSet in the termStore.
The GroupIntranet has a custom list called IntranetsURLs with

CountrySiteURL (single line of text column) and Trigram (which is a multi-valued managed metadata), containing all the trigrams from local sites in this particular country.

ex : France country has the CountrySiteURL "https://superbig.sharepoint.com/sites/FranceIntranet" and the different trigrams "PAR;DIJ;MAR" for local production sites of Paris, Dijon and Marseille.

 

Here is my flow :

Trigger is "For a selected item". I then initialize a big bunch of variables to help the industrialization of the flow (variables help to keep all information to edit in one place if we copy the flow). Then I have a scope

 

 

CopyFlow01.PNGInside the scope, I perform a HTTP request to SP to get the Page's metadatas. It gets me the Version Number and the Promoted State (among other things). With that in mind, I made a condition to check these. Because the Page to be copied HAS TO BE a news and published, so everyone can see it.

 

CopyFlow02.PNG

If these two conditions are not met, easy, we send an email to the user (I woul have loved to display a message directly on SharePoint but did not find any way to perform this)

 

CopyFlow03B.PNGIf the conditions are met, then the flow fetches the list of Intranets URLs .

CopyFlow03A.PNG

After getting the items of the list, we have a Apply to each because, of course, we want to copy that page on each site of the list. So in that Apply to each, we do the following actions :

  • we set the SiteTrigram and PageLibraryID var to nothing (they will be of use later).
  • After using the regular "Copy file" action,
  • we send an HTTP request to SP to get the Site Pages ID from the each site.
  • This will be stocked in our PagesLibraryID var
  • and be used in another HTTP request to SP to get the internal name of the column "LocalSites" where we want to stock the Trigrams (which is a multivalued managed metadata column so as we all know it is really a pain to manage) .
  • We'll stock that internal name to our TaxoInternalName variable
  • Then, for each Trigram found in the Intranets URLs site, we have to set the Trigram string variable to the addition of all these trigrams (label01|value01;label02|value02).
  • Then, the flow will send an HTTP request to SharePoint to edit the properties of the copied page (aka set the Trigrams column and the promoted state to 2 -because SP copy file does not)
  • Finally, another HTTP request is sent to send the publish command.
  • And a little success email is sent to the user (I'm pretty sure this step won't be kept in the future, but for now, it is)

 

CopyFlow04.PNG

SO, I read that avoiding foreach loop inside foreach loops is the best way to optimize one's flow, but here, I can't see a way of doing it.

 

Can you please help me optimizing my flow ? Even if it is "only" on the logical side, I'll be glad to read your thoughts !

 

PS : no logic App / Azure function please, my customer does not want that, he wants something easily manageable.

 

 

 

7 REPLIES 7
Brad_Groux
Community Champion
Community Champion

Flow community member @degvalentine just posted this which should help you - How to Avoid Do-Until Loops and Improve Performance.

If this reply has answered your question or solved your issue, please mark this question as answered. Answered questions helps users in the future who may have the same issue or question quickly find a resolution via search. If you liked my response, please consider giving it a thumbs up. THANKS!

Anonymous
Not applicable

Hello @Brad_Groux ,and thanks for your answer ! Maybe it will help someone.

But I have just witnessed that the longer duration is taken by the standard SharePoint's copy action ( https://docs.microsoft.com/fr-fr/connectors/sharepointonline/#copy-file ).

Actually, this actions takes 25-27s, so multiply by 3 and we already get to 1min30. This is HUGE.

(if I get to do it for my 25 sites, i will get to 10mins ! )

I'm wondering if I could cut my 25 sites into I don't know, 5 groups, and then launch parallels actions of Copy...
Do you think it woud optimize a bit more my flow ?

 

Thanks a lot

@Anonymous, I see you're using many variables inside your Apply-to-each loops. You cited that you do it to facilitate copying the Flow. However, unless you need to aggregate data across loop iterations or reference values from previous loop iterations, then variables inside your loops hinder your ability to use parallelism (in the action's settings under "Concurrency Control").

 

Are you using parallelism on your Apply-to-each?

 

If not, then you could try replacing the variables with Compose actions and add parallelism.

 

A quick hackup pic of your previous screenshot will hopefully save a thousand words...

 

2019-05-09 17_07_28-Re_ How to optimize my specific flow execution dur... - Power Platform Community.png

 

I only guessed that your "For each Site Trigram" loop references the variables set in the parent loop.

Do "Append to Array Variable" variables cause the same issue as a "Set Variable"?
If so, any ideas on how to replace an "Append to Array Variable", within an "Apply to Each" loop, with a "Compose" action? It has to aggregate somehow. 

The "Append to Array/String Variable" actions are perfect for use inside a loop with concurrency, assuming you don't care about the sequence of items in the resulting array/string.

 

The only reason "Set Variable" caused a problem was that it blocked the ability to use concurrency confidently, since all concurrently-executing loop iterations share the variable and overwrite each others' values, causing some serious race conditions to when the variable was being used.

Interesting. Thank you for the info. Wonder if this is documented in the Flow docs anywhere...

Hey @Brad_Groux, I tried the link you provided but received an access denied. Do you know if there's another way to view this?

 

AlexinEdmonton_0-1623361856525.png

Thanks,

 

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