As you've discovered, Tableau isn't a great report bursting engine - just wasn't really built for this work. I suspect you may always be somewhat challenged by this scenario, but it seems you've already identified the main problem as a workbook which is designed in a less-than-efficient manner for the type of work you want to do.

Can you actually identify which Tableau Server process is failing and what it's resource consumption looks like right before the failure? You mentioned TWO crosstabs - how big are these suckers? (How many "marks" does each one render). Big crosstabs can cause lots of RAM (and CPU for that matter) to be utilized while rendering. Tableau also has a built in "watchdog" which will actually kill processes which leverage "most" resources on the machine (90% over the course of either 30 or 60 minutes as I recall)...so if you're rendering PDFS for a long period of time, and VizQL is using 90%-ish (?) of the RAM or CPU over  the course of that time, Tableau Server ITSELF may be killing the VizQL, assuming that something has gone wrong...

Cycling Tableau Server is doing a couple things for you:

• Releasing all the resources held by processes...you said that restarting the process after a failure doesn't do a lot of good...which indicates that you may simply have a process which is using just about all the resources on the machine (what SORT of machine are you running on? How much RAM?)
• It'll reset the clock on the "watchdog".

If this is indeed a resource-management issue, you're either going to have to modify your vizzes so that they are less resource intensive to render (crosstabs and tables generally = BAD in this regard), increase RAM on the box, or just do the cycling you're thinking about...

In addition to Russell's excellent points (especially the fact that Tableau is not a report bursting engine, as much as  some of us might try to make it into one http://github.com/tableau/VizAlerts), what version of Tableau are you on?

The reason that I ask is that when we upgrade Tableau Server from v8.3 to v9.2 the time to render for many of my daily reports (mostly cross tabs, unfortunately) was cut in half, from what I've read there were a number of performance improvements in v9.

Another question is what happens if you spread out the load more, like do 10 at a time, wait 1/2 an hour to an hour for Tableau to do whatever housekeeping it needs to, then do 10 more, etc.?

Jonathan

Hi Jeffrey,

There are a few directions to go in here:

1) Deal with the tabcmd problems. Given that you are on 9.3 I don't have much to suggest except that you might try using trusted tickets and direct URL downloads instead of tabcmd, however I don't have enough experience to know whether that would work since what you're seeing is more on the Tableau Server rendering.

2) Try to speed up your existing workbook. When you are using the multiple-axis crosstab then there's an overhead for rendering every single axis and Tableau does have limits. I've found that using ATTR() can be 1/2 as fast as using MIN(), MAX(), or AVG(). The reason why is that ATTR() is computed in Tableau and requires a MIN() and MAX() to be computed, so by directly using MIN() or MAX() we cut the number of calcs in Tableau and Tableau doesn't have to do any computation itself.

Besides that there are several alternative ways to set things up that could lead to significantly higher performance.

a) Precompute more of the values outside of Tableau so there are fewer computations that need to be done in Tableau. Depending on what you are doing there can be order-of-magnitude increases here.

b) Use a Tableau data blend where there is a "scaffold" source for the layout that is used as a primary source and then your data as a secondary source, where the scaffold source has the dimensionality necessary to get those 24 rows in the view and a set of calculations to get the desired results. See TDT: Data Scaffolding with Joe Mako for an example where he took a dashboard that took 90+ seconds to render down to <10 seconds.

c) Restructure your data to be in a "tall" format that has the dimensionality that you need. Sometimes the Tableau Pivot feature can be of use here, or you can do that pivoting in your source.

3) Fundamentally you are trying to use Tableau like it's MS Excel, and Tableau is not MS Excel. It's a different tool with a different set of capabilities and unfortunately it's easy to think that they are more equivalent then they are. These kinds of kitchen-sink-of-metrics cross tabs are common in Excel because they are relatively easy to build in Excel, but they very often not so good at actually meeting the needs of the business. My suggestion here is to take a step back and work with your users and evaluate the kinds of questions they are trying to answer and then work to that, taking advantage of Tableau's capabilities.

[plug alert] I'm going into more details on this very topic at the Boston Tableau User Group next week, if you're in the area the meeting is full and there's a waitlist, you can register at BTUG @ Fenway Tickets, Mon, May 23, 2016 at 4:30 PM | Eventbrite. I'll also be posting the content after the session. [/plug alert]

I'll respond on the other thread about the lack of response to your other questions, I think you have had expectations of the forums that are not accurate.

Jonathan