Excel input slow - but why?

Question

Dear community,

I am in the process of switching from KNIME to Alteryx and I observe some strange behavior you may be able to help me understand.

I have Excel .xlsx files sitting on a shared network drive. I need to read these into Alteryx. That is extremely slow. Why am I saying this? I did these tests:

1) Reading one Excel file in .xlsx format from shared network drive: 30 sec

2) Reading the same file from local SSD: 5 sec (for sure a local SSD is faster than a network connection...)

3) Now: Reading the SAME DATA but in .yxdb format from network drive (almost same file size as Excel): <2 sec

4) Reading the same Excel file in KNIME from network share: approx 5 sec

So why is Alteryx so slow in reading this Excel over the network? Esp. why is it so much slower than KNIME doing the same job?

Any ideas how to improve / tune this? I do get the raw data in .xlsx - no way changing this. I can certainly cache the input node to enjoy Alteryx' performance for development in Designer. But I am still wasting many minutes reading bigger amounts of Excel files... Any clues?

Thanks for sharing your knowledge with me 🙂 Certainly also links to previous discussions are appreciated - I may have missed them when searching the board before posting.

Thanks & best,

Jürgen

tjamal1 · Answer

I am facing the same issue, although my excel file is around 0.6  MB.

Jürgen · Answer

No - not really. Siemens organized as session with Alteryx development and the responsible person on our end for infrastructure things and some users with similar issues. But no root cause identified to my knowledge yet.. But at least there is attention and, given the many users inside and outside my own organization, there seems to be a general issue that kicks negatively in certain circumstances.

Happy to hear back from Alteryx 🙂

sachinsahu019 · Answer

Hey Jürgen, have you received any solution for this issue yet? We are facing similar issues with Share Drive connections, hence wanted to check