Tableau Performance Recording 📈

If you’re stuck and brainstorming what’s causing the performance of your workbook to slow down?

Don’t worry! The Performance Recording feature in tableau records the performance information about key events as you interact with workbook and keep you covered in improving the performance.

What is Performance Recording?

Performance recording is used to analyse and troubleshoot events that might affect the performance of your dashboards such as query execution, connection to data sources, layout computations, extract generation, blending data etc.

How can I do Performance Recording?

For Tableau desktop -> You can record performance of your dashboard by going to.

Help Menu >> Setting and Performance >> Start Performance Recording

snippet showing “Start Performance Recording” feature in tableau desktop

Now as the recording has started , go interact with your dashboard/workbook as events are being recorded.

Once you are through, you can stop performance recording by going to Help menu >> Setting and Performance >> Stop Performance Recording.

snippet showing “Stop Performance Recording” feature in tableau desktop

Wait for a few seconds, and performance recording workbook will pop-up. You’ll see a dashboard by the title “Performance Summary”.

This Performance recording workbook contains two main dashboards, namely Performance summary and Detailed views.

snippet of “performance recording” workbook

Performance Summary : The performance summary provides high level overview of the most time-consuming events.

The Performance Summary dashboard contains three views: Timeline, Events, and Query.

Timeline

The uppermost view in the performance summary recording dashboard shows the events that occurred during recording, arranged chronologically from left to right. The bottom axis shows elapsed time since Tableau started, in seconds.

In the Timeline view, the Workbook, Dashboard, and Worksheet columns identify the context for events. The Event column identifies the nature of the event, and the final column shows each event’s duration and how it compares chronologically to other recorded events:

snippet of “timeline” in performance summary dashboard

Events

The middle view in a performance summary dashboard shows the events, sorted by duration (greatest to least). Events with longer durations can help you identify where to look first if you want to speed up your workbook.

snippet of “event” in perfomance summary

Query

If you click on an Executing Query event in either the Timeline or Events section of a performance summary dashboard , the text for that query is displayed in the Query section.

If you are connected to a published data source, the query text is displayed in XML. If you are connected to the data source directly, the query is displayed in SQL like shown below:

snippet of “query” displayed in sql

Sometimes the query is truncated and you’ll need to look in the Tableau log to find the full query. Technique like creating Indexes can be used to optimise the query performance and for improving efficiency, Tableau enables you to combines multiple queries into a single query against the data.

Detailed View: While the detail views provide a lot more detail to be used by advanced users when building dashboards.

Depth

The Depth view is the uppermost view in the Detailed Views dashboard and provides insight into what happens when a request is made. This view is the most useful when filtered to a single user request. Examples of user requests are: loading a view, selecting a mark, or changing a filter.

Each bar on the depth view represents a single activity. An activity is a unit of work that is done as part of processing a user request. A single user request results in multiple activities.

snippet of “depth view” under detailed view dashboard

CPU and Elapsed Time

The CPU and Elapsed Time views appear lowermost in the Detailed Views dashboard. You can toggle between Exclusive CPU, Inclusive CPU and Elapsed Time views by clicking on the radio buttons.

The Exclusive CPU, Inclusive CPU, and the Elapsed Time views provide aggregate statistics for each activity. The number of times an activity took place is shown in the Count column and the total amount of time taken by a single activity is shown using the bar chart.

Conclusion:

Performance Recording is associated with the foundation to diagnose Tableau performance issues. Stay simple with your test scenario. Always look at the queries to better understand what has happened, discover the links between your physical/logical design, the features included inside your dashboards and views and the final SQL generated by tableau.

This feature will help you a lot, it’s worth to dig in and speed up your dashboard performance.

References:

Record and Analyze Workbook Performance — Tableau

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