Alteryx Hardware Utilization and Performance Bottleneck

Question

Hi Community,

I am wondering what the community's thoughts and suggestions are as to optimizing Alteryx for hardware utilization and where the common bottlenecks are. What I mean is that I find Alteryx, even with AMP on, it does not seem to fully utilize hardware.

The image below shows the hardware utilization when running this week's Weekly Challenge. You can see the hardware does not appear to be at its limit, but Alteryx seems to be capped out somewhere. The CPU is only 24% utilized and none of the cores are near max. Memory usage is under 2GB when 6GB was allocated to Alteryx. And neither the SSD nor the GPU are utilized for this. So where's the performance bottleneck?

ChrisTX · Answer

One more suggestion:  see this link which has a little information about Resource Utilization:

Knowledge Base / Designer / Tips & Tricks 2016: Workflow Optimization

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Knowledge-Base/Tips-amp-Tricks-2016-Workflow-Optimization/ta-p/31197

And consider creating an Alteryx support ticket to ask for options to improve total run time.

Chris

WeiLi · Answer

bumping this. does any Alteryx dev team members know how to compel Alteryx to use up more resources to more fully utilize existing CPU / memory available?

asking this, because i have worflows that can take hours to run and it really sucks to see CPU 24% occupied.

i am willing to throw more CPU's / RAM at the problem, as long as Alteryx is capable of using it.

WeiLi · Answer

@ChrisTX - Your suggestion is very interesting. See results below. CPU usage jumped to 100% but memory usage has fallen to 350MB. compared to AMP ON, CPU usage was 24% and memory usage was about 1.8GB. i've not noticed a significant difference in final performance speed between AMP ON vs AMP OFF. it seems that AMP ON is trying to improve performance, but some other limit is preventing it from using more system resources.