This morning I had an email from Tiller saying that autorun fill hadn’t been run in the last 7 days. I run it every day. Then I tried to fill my sheet today and got the message in the subject line. I was logged in to tiller, or at least I wasn’t prompted to login. I did login via browser to tillerhq.com and refreshed my connections to try to troubleshoot but nothing changed.
Any idea what is going on?
There is a process lockout that stops two Feeds updates from running at once to prevent data loss. As the message states, if one process crashes, the lockout should expire after 25 minutes.
There are a few ways you can get into this state (e.g. starting updates in two spreadsheets) but the issue should resolve after 25 minutes.
Have you tried again?
I did and it worked after a period. What about that strange email that said I hadn’t filled my sheets in 7 days? Getting that at the same time as the other error made me think they were related.
They aren’t related. One is driven by either not opening the add-on and clicking Fill or not having Auto Fill enabled. The other is caused by somehow running two fills at once in the same sheet (or possibly having a fill crash).
The email is weird since I update daily. I just got another one. Oh well, it seems harmless.
Hi @kingsdotter - Auto Fill is a setting in Tiller Money Feeds and is completely independent of the manual fill you’re doing daily.
If you’re getting an email indicating it hasn’t run in the last 7 days it likely means that at some point you had it turned on and then it got toggled off and you need to toggle it back on if you want it to Auto Fill. Or you can just toggle it on and then toggle it back off to stop receiving those reminder emails.
There was a time when the add-on used to log you out after about 28 days, we’ve extended that to 90 days now. Previously, when you were logged out it would turn off the Auto Fill (but the flag in our messaging system didn’t get toggled to “off”) so you had to toggle it back on in order for the Auto Fill to resume.
Now the Auto Fill will stay toggled on even if you get logged out, but you do have to log back in after 90 days in order for it to resume automatically filling.
Hope that helps!
Heather
So I’ve been getting this error for over two weeks now. I still get transactions pulled in while this error is up but it’s slower than Christmas. Whole spreadsheet is, frankly.
I first assumed I was getting this because I had set up a parallel Excel workbook to test porting over to that so I killed the Excel workbook just in case. However, I’m still getting this error everytime I launch the Money Feeds app and try to Fill in transactions. It doesn’t seem to be keeping me from getting transactions, ultimately, but it’s annoying.
This shouldn’t impact your Google Sheets version from being able to fill.
Does it happen every time you try to fill the sheet?
At what time of day are you trying to fill it? If it’s consistently the same time of day (very early in the morning 2am - 6am) perhaps try later in the day. I’m wondering if it could be conflicting with an Auto Fill that is trying to run in the background.
If that doesn’t help, 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/ and just ask them to pass to me based on our convo here. We’ll need to do more intensive troubleshooting.
I suspect that the slowness is due to the amount of data combined with complex dashboards. Usually the fill will crash and show an error, but I suppose it could be just totally hung up?
More on the ways to improve the performance here: Tiller for Google Sheets Troubleshooting | Tiller Help Center
So, I’m not sure if it matters but I switched using Tiller to a different browser (Brave) from my default (Edge) because of a separate issue (Google keeps jacking up my default Google account).
Anyway, moving to Brave and then turning on Auto Fill which for some reason I hadn’t used yet bypasses this issue.
So, I think I just figured out why I was getting this…
Google Sheets does not have a “Manual Calculation” mode like Excel. This means, on every update to any sheet, the entire thing recalcs.
I had a Tiller sheet that was constantly getting this message. I figured it was a corruption in the sheet, so I recreated it with a new Tiller sheet. Initially, I only brought over one of my many custom analyses as I didn’t have time to do the others. The new sheet worked perfectly… until I brought the other analyses over. Once I brought them over, the error was back, in the new sheet.
I changed my custom analyses, which all use a =query() against the transactions, to use a =IF(updateOn,query(),0) where updateOn is a cell that I change between TRUE and FALSE. I set this to FALSE when I do my Tiller Fill, and then back to TRUE when it is done. So far, this has been working great.
Not sure if this will apply to everyone, but hopefully some get benefit from this.
Impressive debugging, @bradley.jones, and thank you for sharing this.
The add-on sets a metadata flag during fills and then unsets it at the end. This is so it can avoid concurrently trying to run two fill processes. If you have a fill that times out— Google limits script execution to several minutes— due to exhaustive recalcs, the fill process will crash, fail to unset the flag, and you will not be able to run the fill process for several minutes until the flag itself times out.
I think your approach to turning on and off your performance-intensive queries is a good start to making your sheet more performant.
