Background

A business scenario can arise where for example the Tableau Dashboards are running slowly. The Tableau Server is in Australia, the clients who run the slow Tableau Dashboards are in Europe where they experience a lag in the initial load of the Tableau Dashboard. How can we improve the speed without getting a Tableau Server in Europe?

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How to Optimize Tableau Dashboard Speed

Sometimes we may be inclined towards making modifications to the Tableau Services Manager (TSM). But it is important to note that TSM changes help if the overall performance is poor. But when our performance scenario such as this case is geo-specific, there are probably other items that will benefit us more. The data source of the Tableau Dashboard is a good place to investigate first.

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Know the Tableau Dashboard Data

We have to understand how live or how fresh does the data needs to be in our Tableau Dashboard? There are some ways to keep managing the server cache and to keep the dashboards cached by effectively refreshing them routinely. Also where is the data coming from? Are these local to the Tableau Server extracts? Are these live sources outside Australia that are having to be pulled? It is preferable to get the data as close to the server as possible, as extracts if possible.

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Tableau Servers to Speed up Dashboards

A good solution can be using 2 servers, and double licenses. Each site is independent, and we can choose site pods which are essentially locations. Tableau Online can help provide a good performance when the dashboards is accessed from different regions. Also, as a site administrator or data source owner, you can use tabcmd to refresh the published extract with the --addcalculations option to materialize the calculations. Materializing calculations help improve the performance, but it also increases the size of the extract used for the Tableau Dashboard. Thus depending on the different business scenarios we can optimize the performance of the Tableau Dashboards by different mechanisms.

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