Sync Vs Relationships

Re: For example, if I have 4 apps intertwined with cross app relationships, and then a 5th app has a single cross app relationship with one of those 4 apps, did I just lock that 5th app in with the rest of those?

Exactly.

Even a report link field will cause two apps to become dependent, and run on the same server process.

If you go to the home page and suffix the url with

?a=ListExternalDependencies [Edited after original post]

It will tell you which other apps are under the same server process and why.

At the very core of native QuickBase it can only do one thing at a time. So if you bind five apps together that means they load under the covers as if they were one giant application. So that means if the app takes one second to load a report for one user, it could mean that 99 other users are potentially delayed. So if you have apps with a lot of data and a lot of users all of those clicks are trying to squeeze through just one server process.

If you keep the Apps separate then every app runs independently on its own server process and hence the only competition for that server process is from within that single app.

That is why for example every time you do a cross app relationship there is a pop-up warning you that you may be contaminating two apps to be part of one server process.  So you have to think ahead to how big the two apps are and how much data they will have and how many users they will have to decide whether the convenience of Cross App Relationships and Cross App Report Link fields is worth the potential performance hit.  

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Mark Shnier (YQC)
mark.shnier@gmail.com
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Hi Michael,

That is correct if you had 4 apps all interconnected and related to each-other with cross app relationships adding a 5th app with a cross app relationship with one of them would cause that app to become dependent as well. At its core the reason this is happening is that by creating the cross app relationship you are letting your app know it is dependent on that other app for data you want to either be sharing with or bringing over from the other app. To make sure the data your app has is correct it needs to wake up any other related apps and share data with it in the server. When that happens if that app is related to other apps directly it repeats the same process loading them all into the same server to share data. In instances of one or two apps becoming dependent on another app impact is minimal but if you keep relating apps you have more apps that are sharing the limited resources of a server. 

Functions like Quickbase Sync, Pipelines, Automations, etc. were designed to avoid causing this entanglement and are often the tools we suggest when a builder needs to disconnect their apps but have them share data. A single table can become the source of truth across apps via Sync or Pipelines and then fed across apps as needed so that they do not need to be directly related and can continue to move as needed for resource balancing. The guide talks a bit about methods to avoid this and why it is beneficial and in cases where you need help our Care team can often help you identify interdependent apps.

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Evan Martinez
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