Flow Designer maximum actions and performance

[ShAn21]

Hi All,

I have couple of questions regarding flow designer after reading the following in a snow article "By default, flows can have no more than 50 actions. To change the default behavior, increase the value of the sn_flow_designer.max_actions system property. However, consider the performance impact that a large flow may have on your instance.."

I have a huge flow with 130 actions and yes its crazy slow in the UI but runs fine.

So I spoke to our architects and they were not really happy about increasing the min count. So I have decided to split the flow designer into 3 based on a field type. 3 types of requests add, extend and remove. There were lot of ifs and else coz of this. Number reduced easily under 50 for remove type but for add/extension it was still over 50. So I decided to create couple of subflows which was common for both and total actions are clearly below the mark now. I have a subflow which calls another subflow as well.

So my question is

1) Was my approach good to split the flows based on conditions? and also use subflows?

2) Does subflows show better performance then putting everything in one flow (UI works like charm now. ;)) or was my approach just a trick to get under max count 😞

Thanks

[Community Alums]

Using subflows is a great practice - it allows you to potentially reuse some actions in the longer term. It's a bit like when you're coding, try and make a flow do as little as possible, and break out into subflows that do as little as possible - it increases the reusability of your subflows. 

[ShAn21]

Hi Mike

Performance wise does subflow add any value?

For example having 80 entries in a single flow and having 40 entries in the main flow with remaining entries in a sublow which is also reusable. For sure there is no lag in FD UI which takes minutes.

Thanks.

[Community Alums]

Yeah it does help with the UI performance by keeping the number of entries in the flow lower by using subflows. 

There's no performance value-add platform wise by using stuff in subflows.