powerapps studio slows down to a crawl with use

[mcorning]

If i start PowerApps Studio right after i boot up my Surface Book I, everything in the PAS UI is snappy, and it's a delightful developer experience.

But if i keep using PAS for a couple hours, things start to get sluggish. If i open Outlook and/or Visual Studio all at once, things go downhill faster. By then, i might as well go get another latte in between typing sentences or clicking PAS controls.

Memory after bootup is around 53%. with the big three apps running and Microsoft Teams running too, i've seen memory climb into the 90%. If i shut down those memory hogs, memory goes back to "normal" (but PAS never recovers it normal speed in the UI)

I just noticed one other side-effect that made my heart stop:when i reopened PAS without restarting the Surface Book, most of my day's work today was gone, even after PAS warned me there was unsaved work (even though i had been saving all morning, including right before i hit the close button a few minutes ago).

but when i opened my App in PowerApps Web, everything seemed to be there, and i started breathing again. This reminds me of my authoring days back in '96: everytime i tried to add a comment to my manuscript i was writing in Word, Word might crash; so i created a macro that saved the doc with each new comment.

this does not inspire any more confidence in my tools today than it did all those years ago...

[LateNightDBA]

Ditto, same here. Performance between selecting controls degrades after a number of hours. I to also suffer a number of unexpected crashes while entering formula.

[v-yamao-msft]

Hi Mcorning,

What is your PowerApps version? Have you tried the same actions on another PC to see if you would get the same issues?

I am running PowerApps studio on Windows 10 and my PowerApps version is 2.0.542. It works properly on my PC.

If you still get the same issue, please feel free reply.

Best regards,
Mabel Mao

[mcorning]

i reported the version details in another forum (looking for version 2.0.545 which is at least allude to in Power Apps Release Notes). i was using 2.0.542, and when i checked for the version in the Store, i could not find it, so i uninstalled the Studio then installed it again from the Store only to find the version was the same.

remember, you have to be using PAS for more than an hour to start seeing symptoms. sure sounds like a memory or resource link to me (though Task Manager isn't sensitive enough to confirm this empirically).

[v-yamao-msft]

Hi Mcorning,

Actually, I am running PowerApps almost all of the days, but I don’t get the same issue with you.

May I suggest you use Windows Performance Toolkit to obtain performance insights? This article could be a reference for you:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/drivers/wdf/using-the-windows-performance-toolkit-...

Best regards,
Mabel Mao

[mr-dang]

Hi @mcorning,

I'm a fellow Surface Book user. I can confirm that PowerApps Studio is sluggish after a while. I have sent in tickets in the past on this issue and it's greatly improved since that time. Here's a post from August when things were unusable. To put things into perspective, PA would suck up 10GB of the 16GB I had. Luckily RAM usage doesn't go that high that anymore. Clicking a button or dropdown would have a 6s delay. Timers would not count 1 second per second. 

I still see slow down after a while, but it's usable. I think the lag is a combination of a few things:

• data from your data source gets loaded into the app, making it heavier on RAM. I use temporary collections to calculate on the original datasources. When the collections are empty, things run okay. When they pull in data, things slow down for me.
• there's gotta be some kind of leak--PG should ask for some logs or some way of capturing what's causing the slow down 
• a screen has too many elements. I can confirm that I have observed on one of my more complex apps that a complicated screen lags compared to a blank screen in the same app. I use lots of galleries and nested galleries with WrapCount>1.

While PG works on performance issues, I suggest the following not as the solution, but some way to make things usable for yourself in the mean time:

• Save As... your app into different files as you make changes
• Close your app and reopen it every 30 min.
• Switch to CDS. Working in Dropbox and OneDrive are impractical because they're nowhere near as responsive.

I've lost 6 hours of work before--completed under conditions when the app lagged. The feeling is terrible and frustrating.

@v-yamao-msft, I can send over one of my larger apps if you would like to experiment.

[mcorning]

Mabel, if you are not using a Surface Book (and if you're not, tell you boss you need one so your performance matches your customers'), how much RAM does your machine have? I'm guessing 16GB...

i'll look into the perf tool, though. thanks for the tip.

in the meantime, i'll just restart the machine (instead of putting it to sleep) when i go on luch break, and that will "fix" this, for now.

[erga]

Hi @mcorning, 

Thank you for reporting this issue. Our team identified a performance bug in one of our releases that was mitigated in v2.0.560 -- what version of PowerApps are you using? Could you try to see if you hit the same performance issue with the latest version of PowerApps from the Store?

Thanks,

Eric. Software Engineer, PowerApps Staff

[mcorning]

560. Evidently upgrades are automatic.

I will know if the issue remains when I get back to my desk for the day...tomorrow.

[Keegan]

Reviving this thread since I'm having issues described by OP with exact same symptoms. 
I'm running powerapps studio on my Surface Pro 6 with 8GB ram.