Does anyone know if its on the product roadmap to increase the sync speed between Glide Apps and Airtable? Right now it feels like anywhere between 10 and 30 seconds, which is a deal breaker for some clients.
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@mberns01 it’s not planned although we may be able to do it.
Can you tell me more about the desired speed and use case?
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I’d be interested in this too as I use Airtable extensively.
I’ve realised (through trial, error and not reading the docs) that a lot depends on how you set up Glide and Airtable.
On the whole - I find sync instant, which is impressive. But updating in Airtable can take a while to come back to glide.
I believe some of the restrictions is to do with the Airtable API.
Keen to keep an eye on this topic!
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Thanks for your reply David. Here’s an example:
I display a list of records in Glide that are conditional the date in the “Date” field falling within a specific week number of the year.
The calculation that determines which week the date falls in is taking place on Airtable using the “Weeknum()” formula.
The glide user changes the date to fall outside the week of the year which the list is conditional upon, but it takes between 10 and 30 seconds for that record to fall out of view because the new date has to be communicated to Airtable and then the new Weeknum() field has to come back into Glide from Airtable.
Is it possible to have the link between AT and Glide be instantaneous?
Perhaps your solution is to calculate the Weeknum() field in Glide, which im guessing is not that difficult. However, this is just a simplified example and the question would still stand for more complicated use cases where Airtable was required to set the conditions for the list records.
Thank you!
Fyi, this can be done using the Math column, with a WEEKNUM(Date) formula, pointing the Date variable at your “Date” field.
+1 to this.
@david For my use-case, creating new rows and having those rows be immediately editable is a huge issue when working with airtable. This is the case when a “linked” (airtable related) field is updated or created in another table. Here is an example of that flow:
- New user is created
- User edits their information immediately (Does not work sometimes due to sync time)
- User creates a new related record (Record A) related to their user profile row
- User creates related record to Record A (Record B)
These are the issues with each of these steps:
- No issue
- Row is created, but does not show up immediately, around 30 sec to 3 min.
- Linking this record is unreliable, because if the base has not been synced, the record to be linked to (“this row”) will not be added.
- Even if it is, it will not show up for the user immediately. Therefore, users cannot create records for Record A until the full sync with Airtable is complete.
There must be a way to immediately display these linked fields on glides, then letting airtable’s sync catch up later? My solution requires row owners and submitting user emails in different rows, but this is complicated and does not always work. Updating Table A with the related fields from airtable immediately after creating a related row in Table B would improve stability and usability of glide.
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+1 to this. I was so excited when Glide introduced integration to Airtable because it is so powerful and extendable. I wish I had known about the slow sync speed before I migrated my back end from Google Sheets to Airtable. Since our users started using our Glide app two weeks ago, I’ve been manually patching data in the back end to fix the sync issues. Now I feel like I took one step forward and two steps back.
@david please look into speeding up the sync. I’m sure there are many other use cases besides the ones described in this thread.
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Add my vote to this as well.
We have an entire operations app that uses Airtable and glide. This app automated Volunteer management, events, inventory, shift management and training. Everything works well however, in some cases the synch takes too long. For example our app also has a glide page on our website where a volunteer can register to for an event. In case it’s their first time they can create a volunteer profile and then add themselves. This process is done back to back and when a volunteer tries to register, the system cannot seem to sync fast enough to put their name in the signups tables fast enough and the row is in error. This is a deal breaker and so we have to go back to using mini extentisons for this part which works instantaneously.
It would be so nice to simply have one platform and real-time speeds with Airtable.
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+1 to this, we are using Airtable for all our data and it’s much much muck easier to work with data in Airtable, integration with other services is a huge deal for us. We love Glide!!! , but refresh time is quite slow, please add this to your roadmap, as soon as possible. Thank you!!!
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I have an entire Task Management app now running on Airtable and Glide and have had reports of up to 10 min delays for data to be sync between the two systems. It’s causing a lot of heartburn for our users.
I’m really at a loss for what to do here
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I have the same issue, also posted in another thread. Instant sync is a must. Our agency could deliver and provide apps at a much larger scale. Doubling the license fee in our case, wouldn’t even bother us at all if instant airtable sync was possible. Just saying.
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This is a must-have feature. Without it I unfortunately need to cancel my Glide subscription and look for an alternative.
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@david Is there any news in this regard? 
No, no updates. We’re building a new platform for adding many additional third-party sources, and this will make it easier to improve Airtable support.
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We expect to enable webhooks/fast sync before the end of the year.
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Thank you for the update!
Thank you
We take you committment to fix this sync issue ASAP, It affects all Glide dev community
We would also appreciate a faster and more robust sync 
A new incremental sync algorithm goes online this week, which should make sync more reliable. Webhook support for fast updates from Airtable should release in December.
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