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Understanding the Progress Bar & Google’s “6-Minute Wall”

If you are seeing the progress bar in AdminSheet Pro restart several times during a large bulk operation, don't worry—your task is progressing exactly as intended. This page explains the technical reason behind this behavior and how our "Checkpoint System" ensures your data remains safe and accurate.

1. The "6-Minute Wall"

Google Apps Script (the engine that powers all Google Sheets add-ons) has a hard technical limit: no single script execution can run for longer than 6 minutes. If a script tries to process 5,000 users in one go, it will likely hit this "wall," crash midway through, and leave your directory in an inconsistent state. This is a common cause of "Resource Exhaustion" errors in older, less sophisticated tools.

2. The AdminSheet Pro Solution: Automated Checkpoints

To protect your data and ensure 100% reliability, AdminSheet Pro uses an Automated Checkpoint System:

  1. The Timer: When you click “Run,” AdminSheet Pro starts an internal timer.
  2. The Graceful Stop: At the 5.5 minute mark, the app gracefully stops the current batch, even if it hasn’t finished all rows.
  3. The Handover: It records exactly which row it finished on (the “Checkpoint”) and immediately triggers a fresh 6-minute window to continue.
  4. The Resume: The script picks up exactly where it left off, ensuring no user is skipped and no row is processed twice.

3. Why does the Progress Bar reset?

Because the “Resume” is technically a brand new execution thread provided by Google, the progress bar resets to 0% for that specific batch.

  • Batch 1: Processes rows 1–500 (Progress bar 0% -> 100%)
  • Checkpoint: App saves progress.
  • Batch 2: Processes rows 501–1000 (Progress bar restarts at 0% for this new batch)

4. How do I know it's working?

You can verify the progress in real-time by looking at the Status Column in your spreadsheet. You will see the “SUCCESS” or “ERROR” labels appearing row-by-row. Even if the sidebar progress bar resets, the data in your sheet is the permanent record of your progress.

Summary: You don’t need to do anything. AdminSheet Pro is designed to be “polite” to Google’s infrastructure so that your large-scale administrative tasks never crash. Simply keep the sidebar open, and let the tool handle the heavy lifting for you!