Tableau Community Forums

Hello Allan,

I am glad that you did run benchmarks against a RAM disk.

One more suggestion, try to instruct Tableau Desktop to keep internal temporary files on ram disk,  maybe you should touch the TEMP and TMP environment variables. I am sure you could squeeze more juice from RAM disk approach.

From command prompt type set and see where the tmp files are stored, in my case looks like this:

TEMP=C:\Users\cristi\AppData\Local\Temp

TMP=C:\Users\cristi\AppData\Local\Temp

The performance recordings did reveal something  unusual ?

Regards,

Cristian.

P.S.

worth to read One Dot Per Person for the Entire United States
This gentleman did a fantastic job - 300M points placed on a US map.

For testing purpose yes, put   R:\   but write down the existing paths to be able to restore them.

Other option will be to create a small .cmd file with one command inside like this

md R:\path\to\Temp

and place it on

C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup

folder so every time you boot the Temp folder is created on RAM disk.

Don't forget to update TEMP and TMP to point to R:\path\to\Temp if you chose this route.

Regards,

Cristian.

Hello Allan,

I do a small research today (thanks to process monitor utility)  and Tableau Desktop 8.0 use as temporary area this directory on my machine

C:\Users\Cristian\AppData\Local\Temp\TableauTemp

The User variables in my case are:

TEMP=%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Temp

TMP=%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Temp

and System variabiles are:

TEMP=C:\Windows\TEMP

TMP=C:\Windows\TEMP

Maybe you should try to update also the user variables with R:\....\Temp string and run again the benchmark suite.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Cristian.

Note that you can also assign this path as the temp folder(s) using a script. Simply use the set command to modify the variables:

set TEMP=R:\path\to\Temp

set TMP=R:\path\to\Temp

Actually I could imagine having a script to create and use the RAM Disk as temporary environment, and another one to revert to regular settings.

Create and use:

md R:\path\to\Temp

set TEMP=R:\path\to\Temp

set TMP=R:\path\to\Temp

Revert to default:

rd /s R:\path\to\Temp

set TEMP=%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Temp

set TMP=%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Temp

Or something along those lines...

I'm also looking to get a new machine for Tableau. I'm not interested in meeting the minimum requirements...I'm looking to get the fastest tableau machine for the money, so I'm wondering what components are most important.

The baseline machine (Cheap, commodity specs) are:

* Intel i5

* SATA drive

* 8GB RAM

* Discrete graphics card

If I'm going to upgrade the machine, what are the priorities for the upgrades? In other words, which are most important?

i7 vs SSD vs 16GB RAM vs High Performance Graphics card.

Thanks.

-Mark

Mark,

Memory is important and also CPU.

Regards,

Cristian.

Blake Donen wrote:

 

I'm also looking to get a new machine for Tableau. I'm not interested in meeting the minimum requirements...I'm looking to get the fastest tableau machine for the money, so I'm wondering what components are most important.

 

The baseline machine (Cheap, commodity specs) are:

* Intel i5

* SATA drive

* 8GB RAM

* Discrete graphics card

 

If I'm going to upgrade the machine, what are the priorities for the upgrades? In other words, which are most important?

 

i7 vs SSD vs 16GB RAM vs High Performance Graphics card.

 

Thanks.

 

-Mark

Blake/Mark, See Dan Cory's answers within this thread.

A RAM disk / SSD would be your best bet for disk I/O I would think.  Depending on how much data your reports consume, Cristian is right, RAM is king.