Hi Ben,

Can you run this command at the Windows command prompt? WMIC CPU Get DeviceID,NumberOfCores

Run it and upload the result's screenshot. That would help me understand your set up better.

Thanks!

John

Hi Benjamin,

We need to understand what each component does before deciding how many process to assign them.

Backgrounder performs background tasks, extract refreshes, subscriptions and other misc background tasks like garbage cleaning.

Increasing backgrounder would therefore not improve any viewing or loading performance. In fact, it might add more competition for hardware resources.

Backgrounder is computational intensive. Therefore guideline on the manual is a maximum guideline.

If you are not running many background tasks, then there is no point increasing backgrounder.

And if you are running many background tasks during peak periods, increasing backgrounder will affect the viewing performance.

The approach would be then to scale out, having another machine run only background task.

When it comes to debugging Tableau Server performance, changing processes count for components is not the first thing to do. We always recommend running on defaults first to debug what the issue is.

Thanks,

Yu Hua

This makes no sense. The screenshot says the server has 7x4= 28 cores.

OK, let's try again, screenshot after this command please: WMIC cpu get NumberOfCores,Name,NumberOfLogicalProcessors,SocketDesignation.

This will tell us definitively how many physical cores and logical cores.

Oh boy, you really shouldn't be pooling anything with Tableau on VM's or you will run into huge performance issues. Check out this document and see if you can work with IT to implement as many recommendations as possible.

Tableau VM Tuning and Best Practices

John is correct. The following Knowledge Base Article notes the core count requirements:

Tableau Server Hardware Requirements

http://kb.tableau.com/articles/knowledgebase/tableau-server-hardware-requirements

Note the following portion of the above article...

Core count is based on physical cores. Physical cores can represent actual server hardware or cores on a virtual machine (VM). Hyper-threading is ignored.

Tableau Server will only work best when considering the physical core count dedicated dedicated to it on its host machine. I hope this helps when you attempt to work through some requirements with the IT department.