What can I do to get rid of the massive lag while dragging/designing in my workflow?

[john_watkins]

I have written a fairly lengthy workflow at this point, and it seems to keep getting slower and slower when I try to reposition something or add a new tool.   There is now a 20+ second lag from my dragging a tool to the pallet vs. when the screen responds, allowing me to adjust properties etc.    Are there any settings that can reduce this lag?

My PC has 32G of RAM, which has been more than enough for all previous work.  What am I doing wrong here because this is very frustrating with all the wait time?

[Felipe_Ribeir0]

HI @john_watkins .

1) Which tools are you using? Customized connectors, python components, too many macros? How many tools?
2) Have you tried to copy your workflow to a new Alteryx tab and save it?

Could you provide the workflow or a print of it?

With this type of machine, this is very uncommon.

[dana_mcdonough]

Hi @john_watkins : try Disabling Auto Configure from within your User Settings:

Also take a look at this list of Workflow Optimization options that might help improve your workflow performance as well.

Hope this helps!

Dana

[john_watkins]

Things got very busy with Alteryx loads over the last quarter.  Sorry for not checking back earlier. @dana_mcdonough I will certainly try the fix you mentioned above on auto-configure.   This could be the case as the workflow connects to over 20 data connections across various databases.  

[dana_mcdonough]

Great! Yes please test and mark my solution as "Accepted" if it helps. Keep me posted :)

Thank you,

Dana

[john_watkins]

Dana - It did seem to speed up the drag-n-drop while doing things with in-database.   The issue was when I drag a new tool to the screen it doesn't know anything about the data or stream contained within.  I may be doing something wrong.  I know there was something about manually refreshing things, but I didn't see how to do it.

[JamieHankins]

This is my biggest problem with Alteryx.

I can understand if I'm adjusting something in a chain of tools, and Alteryx needs to recalculate all the information about what fields are being passed to where (/similar) but it's strange that there's a delay if I'm adding a blank tool without creating any connections, or even if I'm copying empty containers and such.

As advised above, turning off the autocalc helps, but that comes with its own disadvantages. 

[Josh_Metro]

Changing the auto configuration setting massively speeds up my development since I use so many Python based tools. Thanks for the tip!

[john_watkins]

With Alteryx 2023.1, it almost seems like once you turn that setting off, it may not come back on even when checked.  It helps sometimes.

[KGT]

To provide context around that setting. Whenever you do something in Alteryx, the software refreshes the metadata so that each tool knows what's coming in to it. Turning off auto-configure stops that process and so you need to either hit the tick box on the bottom left of each tool after configuring or press F5 when you want to refresh the metadata.

Now, common things that cause those delays:

• Many Many fields: If you have 1000 fields passing through, it can take a little for the software to re-confirm all the names/data-types/sizes for 1000 fields passing through some tools.
• Live database connections: Some live database connections will take time to establish a connection, get the metadata, and present it. I advise caching these connections while in development until you need to update.
• Python tools etc: I',m not 100% on how these act with the software, but when Alteryx needs to launch another exe in order to refresh metadata, that can have a time penalty.

I have team members on 2023.1 and they toggle that setting at times. I haven't heard anyone mention that they had trouble turning it back on (not a scientific test...). The only thing that I can think of causing it not to come back on is possibly due to a restriction with updating the UserSettings.xml file, but that would affect all the user settings. You can check whether the UserSettings.xml is reflecting the correct setting. I don't believe that should require a restart.

• Setting is <DisableAutoConfig value="False" NoInherit="True" /> in %appdata%\Alteryx\Engine\<version>\UserSettings.xml