List slow in loading

Question

Hello, I'm trying to figure what is causing a list to be slow. there are a few things going on in the list but I'm not sure which one is causing the issue. The list has 133 columns with formatting in 95% and there are 15 calculated columns. there are also 4 workflows that are attached to the list. this is all done in SharePoint Online. I've recreated the list without any formatting and I want to start adding in the formulas and the calculated columns. This is a long process and I'm hoping that someone out there has seen this type of problems before and has some advice and how to find where the issue is.

JjDCRC needs help!! :)

Answer 1

Hi,

There are many reasons that can cause a SharePoint list to be slow such as hierarchical structural navigation functionality, content roll up, large image or videos, too many requests just to list a few. In most cases, the heavy use of calculated column will be the root cause for the slow performance.  This is to mean that if your columns contain so many formulas, it many take huge resources of the server, which in return will affect your SharePoint list performance

If you are using classic Experience SharePoint list, to promote best practice and list performance in SharePoint list, you may try the following steps:

• Add indexes on columns.
• Edit the view and apply filters. Make sure only a portion of items will get displayed under the current view.

Reference:
Manage large lists and libraries.

The following article also provides the best diagnosis ways you can do to know where the problem is in your SharePoint list.

Reference: Diagnosing performance issues with SharePoint Online - Microsoft 365 Enterprise | Microsoft Docs

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Christophe

Answer 2

Hello JjDCRC,

Thanks for your understanding and writing back to us.

Since SharePoint queries the data from a database at the backend, I don’t think hiding the calculated columns will help your situation to improve the performance because even we hide the columns, the data will be calculated at the backend since it’s in the list and generally we apply the index to improve the column performance when using the filters, where it’s more effective option when list is reaching the threshold limit.

So the recommended can be using only few calculated columns or splitting the data into different lists or using different service such as Azure SQL Database.

Note: May be you can give a shot of using columns connected with Power Automate, where getting the calculation value from the Power Automate. You can get more resource from the experts in the Power Automate Community

Regards,
Christophe

Answer 3

Hello Christophe,

Thank you for your quick reply. I had a feeling that between the fact that there are over 133 columns with formulas in over 95% and then the 13 calculated columns all in the opening view, this would slow down the load time. I'm still not sure which way to go. Should I remove all the calculated columns or would you recommend removing the formatting from the columns? The formatting is to add colour to the columns, but I'm not sure that this is what is causing the latency. Should I consider indexing some of the columns? Should I reduce the number of columns in the initial view?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

JjDCRC.