View Acceleration

Administrators and workbook owners who have creator or explorer licenses can accelerate workbooks. Administrators can suspend individual views or turn off acceleration for their site. View Acceleration loads views faster by precomputing and fetching the workbook's data in a background process. There are two potential bottlenecks when loading a view:

1. Querying (fetching data from the data source).
2. 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. For this reason, a workbook's 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 precomputation. 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 precompute 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, then 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, then 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

1. Sign in to a site on Tableau Cloud or Tableau Server.
2. From the Home or Explore page, navigate to the view you want to accelerate.
3. Choose the Accelerate icon, and select 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 precomputes long-running queries, so accelerated workbooks load faster. But if the view is already loading as fast as it can, then acceleration isn’t available because acceleration won’t significantly improve the performance of the view.

Similarly, if you use a data freshness policy that is less than 2 hours, then 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, then 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, then contact your Tableau administrator.

To precompute 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.

Accelerate recommended views

Based on a workbook’s query time and usage, Tableau sometimes recommends acceleration to improve the performance of slower and more popular views and dashboards. If acceleration is available for a view, users can recommend acceleration for a view once every 30 days.

When a user visits a view, they’ll see the option to Recommend Acceleration to the site admin or workbook owner.

When the site admin or workbook owner visits the same view, they see the option to accelerate the view, and they see how many users have recommended acceleration.

Manage Views recommended for acceleration

As a site admin, you can see when Tableau has recommended acceleration for a view:

1. Sign in to your Tableau site.
2. From the left pane, choose Tasks.
3. From the Acceleration status column, check for views with a Recommended status. You can also use the Filter in the right-side pane to filter for views with a Recommended status.

Personalized recommendations for acceleration as a workbook owner or admin:

1. Sign in to your Tableau site.
2. From the top-right of the page, choose the account menu icon.
3. Select My Content.
4. Select the Performance tab.
5. From the Actions column, choose Accelerate.

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.

1. Sign in to your Tableau site.
2. From the left pane, choose Settings.
3. From the General tab, scroll to the View Acceleration section.
4. Set the maximum number of failures allowed per day, week, or month.
5. Choose Save.

View and manage accelerated workbooks

1. Sign in to your Tableau site.
2. From the left pane, choose Tasks.
3. Select the Accelerated Views tab.
4. 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.

1. Sign in to your Tableau site.
2. From the left pane, choose Settings.
3. From the General tab, scroll to the Manage Notifications section.
4. To receive notifications for views that are automatically suspended, check the box for View Acceleration.
5. Choose 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. Select 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).