Welcome

Tuning Tableau ServerPerformance Best Practices

Jonathan Varkovitzky

Product Manager

Tableau Software

# T C 1 8

Introductions

Who are you?Power User?

Tableau Admin?

IT Admin?

Business Leader?

Are you:More than one of the above?

All of the above?

Introductions

Who am I?Started in Perf Testing

Moved into technical customer facing role

Manage all escalated customer cases in Dev

It got slow even though nothing changed!

-Ancient Admin Proverb

Oh but we are on new hardware

Oh but the VMs are in a new data center

Oh but our user base doubled since last year

Oh but we upgraded last weekend

Oh but we ran out of disk space

How Are Issues Reported?

The Things We Hear

User Based Reporting:Specific workbooks underperforming

Individual projects slow

Entire server sluggish

System Based Reporting:Processes seen restarting often

System resources pegged

Tools of the Trade

Task Manager

Available on all Windows machines

Great for a quick snapshot

Can quickly see the worst offenders

Linux Tip:Similar functionality is available using the ‘top’ or ‘htop’ command.

Perfmon

Available on all Windows machines

Hundreds of system metrics!

Highly configurable

Easy to record and share findings

Linux Tip:Similar functionality is available using the System Activity Reporter (SAR)

Tabmon

Created by Tableau for Tableau!

Utilizes Perfmon under the hood

Monitor multiple machines from a single point

Has additional hooks into Tableau to correlate events to resource spikes

It’s open source!

You can download it here: https://github.com/tableau/tabmon

Tabmon

Logshark

Takes zipped logs and turns them into dashboards

Compare and contrast patterns at different times

See trends in how your deployment is being used

Identify the workbooks that are being used most often and potentially slowing down your server

Logshark

Tableau Performance Recorder

Great for single workbooks regressions

Available on Desktop, Server, and Online

Easy to understand output

You see broad information and drill down

Easily package and sent to Tableau

Tools of the Trade

Task Manager

Perfmon

Tabmon

Logshark

Tableau Performance Recorder

What Can You Do About It?

Knobs You Can Turn

Grocery Stores

Workbook design

Database design

Using and optimizing extracts

Modifying tableau topology

VM settings and

Resource allocation

Anti-virus and security software

Planning for growth

Tableau Is Like a Grocery Store

Your cart is like you requesting a viz

You collect all you need in the different aisles

Next you need to check out

Each check out counter is like a vizql process

Workbook Design

Reduce the number of filters

How many marks are still effective?

Avoid massive cross tabs

The more broadly shared the more optimized the data should be

To really become an expert consider giving our whitepaper a read:

https://www.tableau.com/learn/whitepapers/designing-efficient-workbooks

Database Design

Index on key dimensions in your DB

Fewer columns are better

Apply data source filters whenever possible

For high traffic workbooks consider materializing your tables

Optimizing Your Extracts

Localizes your data

Only keep the data you care about

Reduce load on your live database

Hide fields or rows you want to keep private

Materialize your calcs

Quick Hyper Aside

Hyperizing happens at data source refresh

You can still materialize calcs

Perf Improvements!

Automatic deployment of processes

There is an upcoming beta for isolated hyper!

https://prerelease.tableau.com

Modifying Your Tableau Topology

Keep your workers local to one another

Open up your ephemeral ports

External wiki

Isolate backgrounders on their own machine with no more than 1 per core

Don’t exceed 1 Vizql or Data Server process per 4 cores if possible

There is no need to have more than two cache servers per machine

Virtual Machine Resource Allocation

When working with your VM team keep in mind Tableau is a compute heavy application

Reserving CPU and memory allow for a faster user experience

VMWare has a great whitepaper on supporting latency sensitive applications and recommend 100% CPU and memory reservation

Reservation doesn’t mean other applications cannot use the resources, just that Tableau will get priority

Let’s Do an Experiment!

Let’s Do an Experiment!

Anti-Virus

Many of you are limited by cooperate policies

Remember, Tableau is latency sensitive

Security software can act as a filter driver

We strongly encourage exclusions for Tableau and Windows directories

Schedule any active scans for off hours

Planning For Growth

Growth comes in different forms and have to be planned for differently

Logshark or your admin views can give you hints

Your scaling should be based on your particular needs

Reach out to your account reps

Options We Discussed

Workbook design

Database design

Using and optimizing extracts

Modifying Tableau Topology

VM Settings and resource allocation

Anti-virus and security software

Planning for growth

Q&A!

Closing Thoughts

Did any of the detection methods broaden your scope?

Do you feel like you have at least one tool or knob from today could help your organization?

Are you excited for the rest of conference?

Please complete the

session survey from the My

Evaluations menu

in your TC18 app

Designing Efficient Workbooks

R E L AT E D S E S S I O N S

Thursday | 10:45 – 11:45 | MCCNO – L2 – La Nouvelle Ballroom C

Capacity Planning and Load Testing with Tabjolt

Thurs | 12:30 – 1:30 | MCCNO – L3 - 351

Thank you!

#TC18