Designer on very powerful workstations

Question

Hi all,

I'm currently running Designer on a Intel Xeon 4215R with 8 cores, 48GB RAM and temp files on a fast SSD drive. I am using AMP engine and often see all my cores used along with most of the RAM. I am considering going up in performance to, say an AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7985WX with 64 cores, 256GB ram. Does anyone have experience with how well Designer can scale up in performance when the hardware scales up? I'd love to hear from people running on really high-end systems. Any pitfalls and recommendations?    cheers, Mikael

mikael_svalgaard · Answer

Thanks for the comments. I will try to design a simple workflow to test the performance. I have also reached out to Alteryx for some comments. Since we are transitioning machines right now I think we'll be able to test performance across a wide range of machines. Will post the results on this thread.

apathetichell · Answer

It's kind of workflow specific. You're going to get diminishing returns after point X - and that point varies with your tools and your workflow - as well as other potential bottlenecks (network speed when using a download tool/datastream out/datastream in/other tools reliant upon your network). In addition AMP will divide up your memory amongst multiple threads so if you have a workflow which should be single threaded (think of it as having a preexisting bottleneck) - AMP can hurt your overall performance.

Raj · Answer

@mikael_svalgaard Upgrading to a higher-end system like the AMD Ryzen Thread ripper Pro 7985WX with significantly more cores and RAM can indeed provide a boost in performance for running Designer, especially if you're frequently maxing out your current system's resources.

Time taken to run a heavy workflow is inversely proportional to the specifications of the machine.