Workbook owners who have creator or explorer licences can accelerate workbooks. Administrators can suspend individual views or turn off acceleration for their site. View Acceleration loads views faster by pre-computing and fetching the workbook's data in a background process. There are two potential bottlenecks when loading a view:
- Querying (fetching data from the data source).
- Rendering (creating the visuals, such as drawing shapes or rendering a map).
The time it takes to load a workbook depends on the combined time it takes to do these two steps. However, not all views can be accelerated. View Acceleration improves the performance of the query step, so a workbook performance won’t improve significantly if its query step is already fast and there isn’t a performance bottleneck on load.
In addition, View Acceleration relies on pre-computation. The following factors impact the effectiveness of View Acceleration:
- A view uses transient functions, such as now() or today().
- A view relies on user-based functions to provide different results for different users. Even though Tableau Server could pre-compute results for all users, doing so significantly increases CPU, memory and storage usage.
- A view has an extract refresh schedule that exceeds the daily limit. Accelerated views are regenerated when the extract is refreshed. To limit resource consumption, we limit the maximum number of jobs that can be run (12 per day).
- A view’s owner is inactive. Acceleration jobs run on behalf of the view owner. If the owner is inactive, the job fails.
- A view can’t be loaded because the embedded credentials expired or the data source was deleted.
When users create custom views on top of an existing view and accelerate the custom view, both the original view and the custom view are accelerated. However, if a custom view hasn’t been accessed in the last 14 days, the custom view can’t be accelerated. Finally, in addition to the original view, up to 10 custom views can be accelerated for each original view.
Note: View Acceleration isn’t available in Tableau Desktop.
Accelerate your view
- Sign in to a site on Tableau Cloud or Tableau Server.
- From the Home or Explore page, navigate to the view you want to accelerate.
- Click on the Accelerate icon, and click the switch to Accelerate.
You can also accelerate views from the workbook page:
Understand why View Acceleration is unavailable
There are a few reasons that acceleration isn’t available for a view. Acceleration pre-computes long-running queries, so accelerated workbooks load faster. But if the view is already loading as fast as it can, acceleration isn’t available because it won’t significantly improve the performance of the view.
Similarly, if you use a data freshness policy that is less than 4 hours, acceleration isn’t available because the cost is high for accelerating the views that are refreshed so frequently, and Tableau doesn’t want to overload your site performance. For more information, see Set a Data Freshness Policy.
If your administrator has suspended acceleration for your view, contact your Tableau administrator to activate acceleration for your view. Similarly, if the site has reached the limit for the number of views that can be accelerated for your site, contact your Tableau administrator.
To pre-compute the data, Tableau needs to connect to the data source in the background without requiring user interaction. Therefore, View Acceleration is only supported for workbooks with embedded connection credentials.
Manage View Acceleration on your site
By default, View Acceleration is allowed.
- Sign in to your site on Tableau Server.
- From the left pane, choose Settings.
- From the General tab, scroll to the View Acceleration section.
- Select the tick box to allow creators and explorers to accelerate views in their workbooks. Clear the tick box to turn off View Acceleration for the site.
- Enter the maximum number of views that can be accelerated for your site, or choose No limit.
Automatically suspend acceleration to save resources
To conserve resources, administrators can automatically suspend acceleration for views that are consistently failing. Administrators can set a threshold for the number of times an acceleration task can fail per day, week or month before the acceleration is automatically suspended.
- Sign in to your Tableau site.
- From the left pane, choose Settings.
- From the General tab, scroll to the View Acceleration section.
- Set the maximum number of failures allowed per day, week or month.
- Click Save.
View and manage accelerated workbooks
- Sign in to your Tableau site.
- From the left pane, choose Tasks.
- Click on the Accelerated Views tab.
- Choose the Actions menu (...) to Resume or Suspend Acceleration for the selected view or views.
Manage View Acceleration notifications
Administrators can manage whether to receive notifications for views that are automatically suspended.
- Sign in to your Tableau site.
- From the left pane, choose Settings.
- From the General tab, scroll to the Manage Notifications section.
- To receive notifications for views that are automatically suspended, tick the box for View Acceleration.
- Click Save.
When views are automatically suspended, notifications are sent to site and server administrators. The notification includes information about why the view was suspended and the time that the view was suspended. Click the notification to go to the Accelerated Views tab of the Tasks page. From this page, administrators can filter the Acceleration Status to find views that were automatically suspended.
Understand user context for Precomputation
Precomputation for accelerated workbooks is performed with the user context of only one user. This user is either:
- The owner of the workbook (if there are no user filters in the workbook or data source, or if there are user filters on the data source but the data source is a published data source).
-or- - The user that was selected for thumbnail generation the last time the workbook was published (if there are user filters on the workbook and the data source isn't a published data source).
Understand the cost of View Acceleration
Enabling this feature increases the computation load and number of jobs on Tableau Server backgrounder processes because View Acceleration fetches the required data from data sources in a background process. A background job to precompute the data of an enabled workbook is run if any of the following happen:
- The workbook and published data source are republished (this includes the web-authoring save).
- An extract used by the workbook is refreshed.
Administrators should consider those costs before enabling View Acceleration for many workbooks or scheduling acceleration jobs too frequently.
- Workbooks that are being heavily edited and republished might not be suitable because each republish triggers a pre-computation. We recommend acceleration for workbooks that are published for consumption.
- If a workbook uses multiple extracts, their refresh triggers pre-computation of the data. Thus, frequent extract refreshes for enabled workbooks could cause a spike in backgrounder job load, especially given that, by design, View Acceleration jobs are run after the successful extract refresh.
- The pre-computed data for workbooks is stored on disk. Thus, acceleration can increase the disk storage of the server.