Are formulas sometimes too slow for automations?

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1

Am I right in suspecting that formula calculations are sometimes lagging and automations run with the old values instead of their new values? I ran into two problems today that gave me this suspicion. (If it’s true, I’d like to know what to do about it.)

Problem 1:

I have an automation that is not allowed to run when the Author Public Photo (a formula field) is false.

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The problem is: sometimes it does run, and then I get an error message:

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When I then click on the details of the failed automation and I navigate to the entity, I find that Author Public Photo is false (which is exactly why the automation breaks).

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So why does the automation run in the first place when the value is false?

I checked other the entities in the database. This morning, there were 137 that have formula Author Public Photo = false but 8 of them still got handled by the automation, with the predictable error. That’s an error rate of about 6%. Extremely annoying.

Is this a known problem with formula calculations and automation rules?

(P.S. Coincidentally, I found exactly the same problem one hour later in another automation where Clean Email has a value (not empty) but it gets copied as if it were empty. I ran this automation several times. Each time was successful, except for once, when the Name value in this rule ended up empty even though Clean Email had a value. I ran it with exactly the same data.)

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2

Formulas and automations are independent asynchronous services, so it’s not that formulas are ‘too slow’ but rather that users cannot expect determinism when the two services interact.

3

We’ve also seen some instability with Fibery automations. :thinking:

In our case, we had an automation that should send a Slack notification when a checkbox becomes true. But sometimes:

  • the notification was sent

  • sometimes it wasn’t

  • sometimes it was sent twice

Because of that, we moved most important automations to n8n.

Our current pattern is:

  • user clicks a button in Fibery

  • Fibery sends a webhook to n8n

  • n8n handles the logic

Make.com could probably be used the same way.

For now, we keep only very simple automations inside Fibery. :slightly_smiling_face: