Starting a new thread since the thread I replied in had a resolution that did not work for me. I am unable to get my spreadsheet to update at least in the last couple of days. Upon launching in Google Sheets, the progress bar at the top right will start progressing and the ultimately stop at about the 90-95% mark and not finish. If I try to launch the side bar, a “Working” popup appears at the bottom and never goes away and the side bar never loads. After a while, a red bar that says “Exceeded Maximum Execution Time” will appear, but still no side bar.
I tried signing out and signing back in, which caused the side bar to appear for sign in, but then after sign in, I click the “Get Started” button, which does nothing until the red “Exceeded Maximum Execution Time” appears again.
I am signed in on the correct Google profile and am experiencing this in both Firefox and Chrome.
Hi @heather, correct. I actually downloaded Chrome yesterday to see if it would fix the issue as I normally use Firefox. I just checked and I only have my main account signed into Chrome, which is the one that is my Tiller account.
Also, just tried incognito mode and got the same issue.
Can you let me know how many tabs you have in your sheet? My guess is that the progress bar is choking on complex formulas/calculations/dashboards in your sheet and that is hogging up the execution time that Google has to use so when you open the sidebar there’s no time left.
Some code changes may have exacerbated this issue, but need to understand what type of data set/sheets you’re working with.
Feel free to write to support@tillerhq.com about this issue directly if you prefer not to share these details via a public forum.
As a test, I removed any of the above that were Community Solutions. This actually allowed the progress bar at the top right to finish, but I still cannot open the Tiller Money Feeds sidebar. I created a new Tiller Foundation spreadsheet just now and everything works just fine, with all transactions importing and I can open the side bar on this new one. It seems like my original spreadsheet might have gotten corrupted or something?
It’s possible yes that edits to it somehow caused it to get stuck when trying to open the add-on. I’m not totally sure, I’ve seen this rarely in the past, but I don’t recall whether the error you’re seeing was involved and I do know that the changes with the upgraded API could be also causing that error to pop up.
If you let the progress bar in the top right finish and then wait a minute or so, are you able to open the add-on? Does it give you the same Exceeded Max time" error or is it doing something different now?
Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. The old spreadsheet that was giving me the issues does seem to be working fine now after leaving it alone for a week. It successfully finishes the progress bar, the side bar opens, and the contents update correctly. Not really sure if this gives an idea of what the root cause was, but at least everything is working! Thanks for the help!
I am having the same problem. When I do Tiller money feeds > Launch I get a spinning icon and the side bar never loads. After a while, a popup that says “Exceeded Maximum Execution Time” will appear, but still no side bar. I am using Chrome on a powerful Macbook Pro with enough RAM that no swapping is needed.
Based on the earlier discussion I looked at the issue of multiple tabs, and you were spot on, @heather! I removed several tabs that I had created myself, and all is well now, though remarkably slow. I’ve included a bit more detail at the end.
This experience raises some questions for me:
Why does merely launching the sidebar make changes to the sheets that trigger computation?
Why does it take several second for the sidebar to react to each navigation button push? For example, it took 4 seconds from pushing the Autocat button before the Autocat sidebar appeared, and 5 seconds to get back to the top-level sidebar after pushing Back. I would expect these to be pretty much instantaneous, since they don’t actually run anything
Does Fill update the Balance History and Transactions sheets with one (batched) update each, so computation is just triggered once for each sheet? If a separate update is done for each addition to these sheets I can well see why this problem would happen on Fill.
Fortunately I no longer need the tabs I removed so I can keep working, but I wanted to give you more detail about this issue, and it would be great to have it fixed, especially the residual slowness.
More detail: The tabs I removed included some that do heavy computation on the Balance History and Transactions (to group transactions according to when they occurred in the balance history for reconciliation purposes back when there was some trouble with the feeds and a few transactions were missed). These would be recomputed on each change to the Balance History, and I had hundreds of updates, having been away from this for some time. So I can well imagine that, if recomputation is triggered on each new balance, the computation would hang.
Thanks for your reply here and glad that removing some extra tabs got things working for you again.
I’m not sure on this one actually. I am not aware of anything the add-on is doing on launch that would require the sheet to start re-calculating.
This is just due to the UI framework underlying the sidebar. It’s due for an upgrade, but we don’t have a timeline on that just yet.
This happens in two steps I believe, but as soon as a single transaction is added to the Transactions sheet things will start re-calculating. The add-on also is inserting data at the bottom of each respective sheet and then sorting the sheet newest to oldest by date, which is a slow/expensive process.
There are a lot of refinements we could make to improve this experience, and we will, but they’re a bit further out on the roadmap.
Thanks for your prompt response, @heather. I completely understand that these improvements are not high on the priority list. I look forward to their coming eventually.
This happens in two steps I believe, but as soon as a single transaction is added to the Transactions sheet things will start re-calculating.
Right, so I’m wondering if single transactions (similarly balances) are added one at a time or all in a single operation? I think a single operation to add followed by a sort would be okay, but adding one at a time would be deadly.
For the future: I’m not sure whether the Google Sheets API allows bulk updates as a single operation. If not, a workaround could be to accumulate the new transactions (similarly balances) in a new sheet with nothing depending on it, and then do a single copy(or cut)/paste to put them into the transactions (or balance history) sheet. I would expect that to trigger just one re-calculation, and then one more for the sort.
Hi @ossher the answer to how transactions are added into the sheet is somewhere in between. The API the add-on uses allows us to write a block of values to each sheet as a single operation, but writes to separate sheets happens sequentially. The block write operation that changes values will trigger a recalc of your spreadsheet.
Hi @raistlen, thanks! That is what I had expected, but when this problem arose I began to wonder. It is still a mystery to me why I would get a complete hang if only 2 recalcs are triggered, one for Transactions and one for Balance History (plus another 2 for sorting after the block update), and a complete mystery why this would occur on merely launching the Tiller Money Feeds sidebar before sheet filling is even requested. Unfortunately it looks like something rather obscure is going on. Welcome to complex software!
This is pretty unusual behavior, @ossher. If your feeds aren’t working well, I’d recommend reaching out to our support team via the chat window in the lower right corner of the Console at https://my.tillerhq.com/.