How can we speed up initial Tableau Server Dashboard load

2
votes

In Tableau is there any way, any settings or configuration changes, that would make the initial load of dashboards on Tableau Server much faster? I have very high performing dashboards that take sometimes minutes to load for the first time someone opens them on Server. This is painful.

We are using Tableau Desktop 9.3 We are facing performance issue in both “Tableau Desktop” and “Tableau Server”. Below is the observation: Source: SQL Server Dataset: 2 SQL views (extracted) Records: 6 Million

Just to give little bit of background on how we built this dashboard. We have pricing data in one dataset and billing data in another dataset. We have created One heat map and two bubble charts showing billing by customer and other two sub categories (All using Billing data) We have created one cross tab to show part price by “Region” with customers (All using Pricing data) We have a created a scatter plot to show Price and Bill together (Data blending) Since we have two different datasets, we have created around 10 parameters for Filters.

After placing all these sheets and parameter controls in one dashboard, we observe that every time we open the dashboard either in Server or Desktop it takes around 60-90 secs to open the initial view, post that its pretty quick even I use multiple filters. However, the moment I reset all the filters it again takes around 60-90 secs to get back to Original View. We just have 6 million records in total combining both the datasets, hence we are clueless about the slow performance and would need your assistance to understand if we are going wrong anywhere. Thanks, G

Thanks, Ganesh

2
tableau-api
Without any details, it is hard to recommend anything. But what you should do is use the Performance Recorder to find what is causing your slowness. onlinehelp.tableau.com/current/server/en-us/… – Bernardo
Hello Bernardo, I have added details to the question. Please Advise. – Ganesh
If you're creating data extracts, make sure to create all your calculated fields before you take an extract. This will increase performance. Nothing else really jumps out that you have described. Check to see if there are any network issues, or other factors that Tableau cannot control for. – Bernardo
More performance tuning tips can be found here: blog.databender.net/2015/07/24/… I would suggest considering pre-aggregation in materialized views. Also, if Tableau has to render too many data points, but on the view they all blend in anyway (behind each other) then you can try aggregating or grouping those, to reduce rendering load. – Dimitri B
Tableau itself has produced some pretty good guides for performance tuning: ask you local Tableau rep and they will probably send it to you. And make full use of the performance recording feature: it will identify where exactly your dashboards are slow. Also, tableau Server should cache a lot of recent queries to speed loading if set up correctly so it is important to know whether your server settings are right. – matt_black

2 Answers

0
votes

Ganesh, the main reason why tableau dashboards take time to load in server is due to the data blending method you are using - "We have a created a scatter plot to show Price and Bill together (Data blending) Since we have two different datasets, we have created around 10 parameters for Filters."

Whenever data blending is done, and if it is done at the granularity of date level, the dashboards will eventually take a lot of time to load. You should rather go for other methods of data processing such as join/merge instead of data blending.

0
votes

We ran across a similar problem and it turned out the be the API calls to the third party map provider that caused the delay. It sounds like you are using heat maps, so this may be the cause and can be remedied with a setting in Tableau server.

Tableau provided us this test link to see if it was a problem with our server config.

https://maps.tableausoftware.com/tile/d/mode=named|from=tableau1_2_base/mode=named|from=tableau1_2_admin0_borders/mode=named|from=tableau1_2_place_labels/ol/6/17/27.png?apikey=ttab56540ba691a909b0f7d2af0f6fe7

If the response is slow then it's a configuration issue with the server.