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