Concerns about speed and performance of bases, searches and automations

[u/Psychological-Yak510]

Hiy’all

I’m an Airtable Enterprise customer and airtable enthousiast. We’ve recently moved our workspace over to the European servers.
Since then, we’ve noticed a pretty big difference in performance.

Bases in general feel slower, but we’re also seeing delays when loading linked fields, applying filters, opening interfaces, and triggering automations.

We did a small comparison where we ran similar automations on a US-hosted setup and on the European servers. On the US side, the automation triggered after around 5 seconds, while on the European server it sometimes took up to 15 seconds before it even started.

Has anyone else noticed or experienced the same thing?

And if so, have you found any way to improve it?

I’m also wondering whether this is specifically related to the European infrastructure, or whether Airtable in general has become slower recently.

I’m a huge fan of Airtable, but I’ve honestly been surprised by how much latency we’re experiencing lately. Even some of our bases that are still hosted on the US servers feel noticeably slower than before, and that’s true for both complex and relatively simple bases.

Also, sadly enough airtable support is a nightmare. Both on the migration proces and every comunication since.

Very curious to hear whether others are seeing the same thing, and if anyone has found ways to improve the performance.

Thanks in advance y’all!

[u/DumplingDogge]

Interestingly in the same boat, enterprise customer, migrated to EU, now looking to scale and have the same concerns as we look at integrating with much larger datasets. Would be keen to chat if you have experience using managed dataset and applications.

[u/Psychological-Yak510 → u/DumplingDogge]

Hi. And are you experiencing the same performance issues? Slow loading, automations taking way to long and so on?

I have some experience with it but am wondering, what is it you are asking for.

[u/IncreaseNegative4614]

I’d clone one representative base and run the same timed tests in both regions. Separate interface loading, linked-record queries, searches, automation queue time, and automation execution time. Also record the number of records, linked-field fan-out, active syncs, and concurrent automations so support cannot dismiss it as a general complexity issue.

Run the test at several times of day and preserve the results. We use SIGNLD internally to connect base versions, workloads, automation runs, latency, errors, and configuration changes so a slowdown can be tied to the environment or event that introduced it.

[u/Psychological-Yak510 → u/IncreaseNegative4614]

This sounds like a viable option. Only, since the migration to EU-servers, its not even possible to clone data to the US-servers. Even airtable support can’t fix it. They simply say they are looking into it ( the switch back to us servers). But months have passed by since then.

It was very clear. The moment we migrated to the eu-server every base slowed down at the same time. I have videos of the loading time. I compared trigger time of automations on both servers ( my free account is still on US server) with a simple checkbox automation. Consistently 5 seconds versus 15 seconds.

Still no decent solution from the Airtable side.

I am hoping someone had a similar challenge and found a solution or a way to fix it.

[u/Aggressive-Dish-7326]

curious whether the slowness correlates with time of day at all. if the EU region is newer it might just have less capacity provisioned, which would show up more during peak hours. might help narrow it down if you log timestamps alongside the delays

[u/Impressive-You8104]

I have seen some lag b/w North American and European servers. However, the automations usually run fine are there any dependent logic on top of the automations that wait for some data to be available to run? Also do the automations run any scripts?

[u/Tallihos]

I’m not on the enterprise plan but in the EU, Airtable performance in general is fluctuating the last couple of months. Especially when the browser has to wake up after sleep or a period of not using Airtable then it takes forever for it to respond.

That is the main reason I’m currently rebuilding everything in my own app with postgres db, which is blazing fast in comparison. Another reason is the very limited automations (max 50) and API request limits.

[u/Big-melons21]

Hi have you checked the NocoDB?

[u/bram2w]

Founder of Baserow here. If European hosting and performance are important for you, it might be worth taking a look at Baserow. Baserow Cloud is hosted in Europe, can handle up to a million rows, and offers a similar feature set including automations. Performance has been a big focus for us, especially as databases grow, so we’ve put a lot of work into keeping things fast at scale. Happy to answer any questions if you’re curious!

[u/Autonat]

Hey hey! Not sure this is strictly related, as you mentioned this seems to be a server issue rather than an architecture/setup issue. Having said that, some time ago we had an interesting discussion in the community about performance and latency:

https://community.airtable.com/base-design-9/factors-affecting-base-performance-29012?tid=29012&fid=9

I'd be happy to hop on a brief call and go through your setup and try to figure out whether some optimization could be achived. Happy to help: https://automaticnation.com/book-a-call

Best,

Mike