Asana stops working properly in projects with more than ~1000 tasks hidden under collapsed sectionst

[JFrentz]

Asana crashes for growing organisations dedicated to Asana
This is not a new problem, it’s been reported by me through multiple channels before during the pasts 12 months. The problem escalates with growing organizations fully dedicated to running their business operations in Asana. It occurs on both desktop and web apps, for different users, on different computers and browsers.

Very unclear to me how Asana still hasn’t fixed this issue, especially with increased enterprise focus over the last years.

Collapsed sections is great, just don’t load all task in the project at once
Since the release of Collapsed sections, you offered a way to get a better overview, faster navigation, and make tasks in lower sections more accessible. It is a great feature until it crashes the whole user experience due to loading all tasks in the project at once even if it’s not visible or ever needed to the user viewing the project.

My take is that collapsed section is not fully implemented as it was intended to be used or at least it was not developed to handle larger projects.

Simple fix, just load tasks that are requested by the user to look at
The fix is simple and has been communicated clearly many times by me. Don’t load all the tasks in the project at once, get 0 - 50 tasks or so for each section when collapsed, and only load the rest for each section when it is expanded and visible to the user. The user normally looks for one task but you load all 1000+ every time, it’s a waste of your resources and the user’s time.

Increase the priority and resolve this issue forever
There are ways around this, like restructuring the data into multiple projects, but it’s cumbersome for all your organizations to do it. Why won’t Asana fix the source of the issue for all their organizations instead?

The problem is growing, as your customer organization grows and expands its use cases of Asana. Asana feels slow and then broken to these users.

For details look at the previous videos and information I’ve sent to you before, through the forum, support@asana.com, and to @Kem_Ozbek .

Please, increase the priority of fixing this issue, it is a small fix with a big impact on your most dedicated and valuable clients.

[Gabriel_Cole]

Agree with this a 100%
For companies fully using Asana and scaling rapidly this is a critical error. Projects with many tasks become unusable and it makes Asana seem broken for the end users.
Team members get their work flow interrupted and it creates a lot of frustration.
Please prioritize and solve this Asana

[Jan_Rajdl]

I’ve noticed this issue during last few days. One of my project is now completely blocked and I almost cannot work with all the work there. Still waiting and getting the “Page unresponsive” notice. Literally I lost access to one of the most important part of my work now…

[Bastien_Siebman]

They might have temporary issues, you were correct to post. I have a project with 25k tasks and it works well, Asana is supposed to be able to handle that many tasks.

[Jonas_O]

This is not a temporary issue. This is a error that happens when you have collapsed sections. You probably dont have collapsed sections in that project @Bastien_Siebman

[Bastien_Siebman]

When the project is too big you can’t collapse sections anymore. So maybe it broke because the layout was saved with collapsed sections

[JFrentz]

@Bastien_Siebman 12 months+ is not temporary to the users experiencing it. It’s clearly stated in my original post.

I’ve updated the title of this topic to clarify that this problem occurs with collapsed sections. If you have a project with 25 000 tasks that don’t belong to collapsed sections, the pagination likely works fine, as you load more tasks when you as a user scroll down and fetch more to view them.

The problem is that Asana App loops through and loads all paginated tasks for the whole collapsed section when the project loads. So basically if your 25000 tasks all belong to a collapsed section, Asana would get all 25 000 tasks every time you open the project. So it continues to load until it’s done and that freezes the client and the error message shared in the original post is what is returned to the user.

My point is, in your 25000 task project, you don’t want asana to load all those every time you open the project because you don’t need them all the time. Why do it when the tasks are under a collapsed section? It doesn’t make sense, it’s not implemented correctly as it is now, fix it now!

The benefit of collapsed sections is partly to access tasks lower in the list faster, to access let’s say task 24000 as fast as possible. If you don’t use collapsed sections you need to wait to fetch from a paginated list of tasks as you scroll through. I have not timed it but I would guess it would take you an hour+ and Asana would crash.

If you instead would use collapsed sections every 1000 tasks, then you could easily scroll down to section 24 and expand to access task 24000 within seconds. Asana should stop getting all tasks under all collapsed sections every time a user opens the project.

[Jonas_O]

Yes. They need to fix it. Thats the whole issue here. I dont understand what you are argumenting?

[JFrentz]

@Bastien_Siebman
You try to describe the issue of collapsed sections not working in larger projects as a feature. Why would you want a feature to stop working? How is that benefiting anyone? Instead of just loading collapsed sections in a more effective way. We highlight a problem that crash Asana and you defend it as it is a benefit? to whom?

[Jonas_O]

The problem is that asana loads part of the project and when you scroll down it fetches more tasks when a project is big. So when the sections is collapsed it starts loading all the tasks at the same time because it thinks that you have scrolled to the end of the project.

A suggestion would be to only load the tasks in a section when its expanded. Then it would be possible to enter the project and start working in the last section for example. But as it is now its not possible to even access the project.

Its a issue with their lazy loading of the project.

[Bastien_Siebman]

@Jonas_O

I dont understand what you are argumenting?

I am on your side guys I was just giving hints about what is happening, while approving this is definitely a bug. You should probably move it into the Bugs section of the forum. We’ll let @Rebecca_McGrath make sure it is escalated quickly as it is quite problematic!

[JFrentz]

Thank you @Bastien_Siebman , that is helpful.
Your vote would also be appreciated.

We are not able to create topics in the Bugs category. This has been tested with 3 different users and computers. This issue has been reported to @Rebecca_McGrath in a separate topic and is now sent in a dm to her. If you are able to move it @Bastien_Siebman , please feel free to do it.

The button is disabled specifically in the Bugs category.

UPDATE: Oh, I did have access to move the topics to bugs, it worked, thanks. Can’t just create new topics there it seems. But now the votes disappeared, so @Stephanie_Oberg and others’ votes are not visible anymore.

[Bastien_Siebman]

The bug category does not have votes indeed, only Product Feedback does.

[Jan_Rajdl]

I’ve discussed this a lot with Asana support in recent days and it seems that we found a reason (and solution). The problem is a project with more than 100-110 sections (doesn’t matter if they are opened or not). It’s strongly recommended to separate these sections into projects and then into portfolios. I’ve found that you can work with the project but with significant delays (usually 2-3 page timeouts).

From my observation I think that you can accelerate this issue by adding a lot of complicated tasks into sections - complicated means tasks with a lot of dependencies and multihomed in a lot of other projects. But in the end, it’s not a problem about a count of tasks, but sections.

I’m afraid this isn’t a bug but a technical limitation of Asana.

[JFrentz]

Thank you @Jan_Rajdl for increasing priority and investigating the source of the issue.

We have this problem with a project of <1500 tasks separated under <15 sections.

We have multiple projects whit these numbers that give the results posted with images in my first post.

[Jan_Rajdl]

Hmm in this case it looks really strange… I suppose that you already tried to solve the issue by Asana suggested steps: Asana supported browsers and troubleshooting steps | Product guide • Asana Product Guide ?

[JFrentz]

The problem is that Asana frontend app gets all tasks under all collapsed sections when a project is opened. It loads all 1500 tasks every time the user open the project. As stated in my first post it’s been tested on many computers and both web and on desktop app. Same problem for all.

The browser is not the issue. The link you posted is not solving anything. It’s built in to Asana app. Browser independent. It’s been tested, screenshot, recorded and sent to Asana support team.

I’m available for a video call to demo, respond to questions and test.

I run MacBook Pro m1 pro 2021 and the organization of 150 employees experiencing this limitation is mostly running on windows based dell setups.

It’s not a browser, os or hardware limitation. The problem is how Asana App loads tasks in projects with collapsed sections.

EDIT: The tasks in these projects don’t have dependencies but also belong to one more project.

[Jan_Rajdl]

Understood. So it’s a little bit different problem from mine, because I have open only dozens, maybe low hundreds of tasks in the project. But even though we’re running 2000+ Asana seats in our company, nobody works with such huge projects as 1500+ tasks. In case of some tasks are closed we aren’t facing any loading issues - even there are thousands of tasks.

I got a quite good advice from Asana support team - to separate bigger projects to a more smaller and aggregate them into a portfolio.

[JFrentz]

I hear you, different business, different use case, architecture and way of operations.

I just don’t get why they don’t change how tasks in projects with collapsed sections is loaded. They are wasting resources and creating a bad user experience instead of just do it more efficiently.

The point of collapsed sections is to hide information that is not relevant to the user on load. Why then load it? It’s broken as it is and it’s a clear opportunity to make the product better for teams, their clients.

They need to solve this bug, product limitation, it’s not going away until they load tasks in collapsed sections more effectively.

[Stephanie_Oberg]

I agree totally. There is really no good reason for loading collapsed Sections.

Scale, Asana, scale.