Reference Project Begins Running Slow with Lots of Tasks

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Hey team!

thank you so much for your help. I’ve really appreciated all the advice that I’ve gotten here. This is a great and very helpful team of people.

We have created a reference project for our media management tasks. Basically, we have a project that exists to serve as a hub or a repository for the media that we manage from across the Earth. Each task represents a package of media. We’re using a reference project to organize these media management tasks and various stakeholders browse this project to find the stories they need to create marketing pieces.

The problem is that the project has now collected so many tasks that it’s beginning to run slow. I’m suspecting the reason this is the case is because we are a media organization and we care about visuals, and so we have thumbnails for each one of the tasks. Some of the thumbnails are higher res, and I’m suspecting the problem is coming from the quantity of tasks combined with the thumbnails.

I’m considering solving this problem by creating a reference archive project, basically a second reference project where these tasks will be archived to that project at a certain date threshold. This way, the amount of tasks in the actively managed Media Hub project is reduced, and they are automatically archived to a sort of offline project based on a date threshold. Before I implemented this as a solution, I wanted to see if anyone here had attempted to solve this kind of a problem, and if so, is there a better way to tackle this?

While I realize in an ideal world we would only use low-res thumbnail images, we live in the real world. People move very fast; we have tight deadlines, and sometimes people are just going to slap a high-res image in there, and that’s going to be how it is. Saying that we’re going to down-res every single thumbnail is just not realistic in a production workflow when you’re moving fast, but we care about those visuals and we need to have them so that when people are browsing through the media, they can look at the thumbnail quickly and understand what they’re looking at. Let me know what you guys think. Thank you!

-Justin

1 Like
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About how many tasks does it have? (And are there subtasks?) Do you typically use it in List view or Board view?

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Love this @Justin_Jenkins !

I agree with creating a separate Archive project; that’s a brilliant approach. You can also automate this by adding a rule, for example: when a task is marked complete or when a specific custom field is set → move the task to the Archive project.

Another idea is to create archive projects based on time periods, such as “Q1 Archive” or “April Archive.” If you’re using Asana AI Studio, you can even build an automation that uses AI to decide which archive project the task should be moved to based on its content or dates.

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We use it in board view! There are hundreds of tasks at this point. Maybe not thousands yet though. We don’t use as many subtasks as each tasks represents one package of media.

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Okay great! I was wondering if anyone else had determined a standard solution to this issue other than what i was brainstorming. Because I would rather measure twice and cut once, so to speak, before rolling this pipeline out. But it sounds like I am thinking along the correct lines and there is no other standard approach to solving this one that someone else has determined that is superior.

But if that is not correct, someone please let me know!

-Justin