How can we speed up initial Tableau Server Dashboard load

Question

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

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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.