Tableau is Slow. 5 Tips to make it faster.

Tableau is Slow

Around the web you will find reports of Tableau being slow similar to those shown below, this article tells you how to make Tableau faster:

  • "Why is Tableau so slow? How can I make it faster?"
  • My Tableu is having performance issues, how do I fix it?
  • What slows down tableau the most?
  • How can I make my worksheet load faster?

What is Slow?

First do some investigation and thinking:

  • How long is it taking to load a worksheet?
  • How many panels do you have in the worksheet?
  • How many data points does each query return? (date range? sampling rate?)
  • What is your back-end data source?
  • Is your Tableau server at max capacity? (CPU/RAM)
  • Is your data source server at max capacity? (CPU/RAM)
  • Network bandwidth/latency between Tableau and the data source?
  • Network bandwidth/latency between Tableau and the client?
  • If you run the queries outside Tableau, are they slow there too?
  • Has performance only recently got worse? What changed? (Upgrade? Server? Panels?)

Create a performance recording in Tableau Desktop

  1. To start recording performance:
    Help > Settings and Performance > Start Performance Recording
  2. To stop recording and view a temporary workbook containing results from the recording session:
    Help > Settings and Performance > Stop Performance Recording
  3. You can now view the performance workbook and begin your analysis.
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Tips to run Workbooks Faster

  • Pull Less Data - Only connect to data sources you need and only pull back the limited data you need. The more you change data or perform joins, the slower it will run.
  • Non-Realtime = Use extracts. Extracts are a quick way to make most workbooks run faster.
  • Reduce the number of charts. Rather than trying to show everything on one page. Either create separate pages OR allow the user to later drill down into data.
  • Limit your filters. Filters can cause performance issues if used too much.
  • Use Aggregated Data. Does aggregating the data give users the summary they actually need.
  • Remove unused columns.

See Also