5 Replies Latest reply on Oct 25, 2018 7:59 AM by Rob Palmer

How to tackle long "Sorting Data" events in Performance Testing?

John Taylor Aug 27, 2018 9:24 AM

I'm having trouble improving the performance of a worksheet. The view below is counting a distinct INT across age and gender dimensions. It is resulting in some costly "Sorting Data" events compared to everything else in the performance recording. I can't share the workbook unfortunately, but I'm lost where to begin here.

Is it really spending that much time computing which mark each distinct INT goes in?

I tried this with no sort on the pills vs sorting the first number of 'x - y yrs' , same issue. Wondering if "Sorting Data" is closely tied to all of the filters on the worksheet?

I imagine without a workbook there may not be much help I can get here. Any direction or guesses would be appreciated.

1. Re: How to tackle long "Sorting Data" events in Performance Testing?

John Taylor Aug 28, 2018 11:40 AM (in response to John Taylor)

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2. Re: How to tackle long "Sorting Data" events in Performance Testing?

Manjul Pant Oct 25, 2018 7:36 AM (in response to John Taylor)

Hi John ,

Were you able to fix this ?

Facing the same issue .

Regards
Manjul
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3. Re: How to tackle long "Sorting Data" events in Performance Testing?

Rob Palmer Oct 25, 2018 7:40 AM (in response to John Taylor)

The first port of call I would look at is the aggregation level and width of the underlying data source. Do you need all the columns that are being presented? Do you need all the rows or can you pre-aggregate. Whilst Tableau is great at working with large data sets, it still has its limits. If you can reduce the volumes then that will have a dramatic impact on performance.
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4. Re: How to tackle long "Sorting Data" events in Performance Testing?

Manjul Pant Oct 25, 2018 7:44 AM (in response to Rob Palmer)

Yeah Rob , Thanks .

But what we are trying to understand is what is " Sorting Data " for some of our dashboard it doesnt show anything like "Sorting Data " . On which Scenarios it will opt for sorting data .

Regards
Manjul
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5. Re: How to tackle long "Sorting Data" events in Performance Testing?

Rob Palmer Oct 25, 2018 7:59 AM (in response to Manjul Pant)

Hmm not sure that's documented. The closest that I found is:

Tableau's Order of Operations

It could have been in a Tableau conference session though. Sounds like something they would cover.

My understanding is a lot of things can cause that and it depends on the operations you are performing on the data as to what's causing it.

The other thing that can cause issues is if you have a lot of filters. I've had a lot of success with context filters in the past:

Improve View Performance with Context Filters
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