Community Spring Cleaning week is here! Join your fellow Maveryx in digging through your old posts and marking comments on them as solved. Learn more here!

Engine Works

Under the hood of Alteryx: tips, tricks and how-tos.
ned_blog
8 - Asteroid

Frequently asked question: Why is my computer so slow when I run Alteryx?

 

The short answer is that Alteryx is designed to use all the resources it possibly can. In order to make Alteryx run as fast as possible, it tries to balance using as much CPU, memory and disk I/O as possible.

 

The good news is that most of the resource utilization can be controlled. You can limit the amount of memory uses on a system, user or module level. For best performance you want the memory set as high as possible - although the 32bit Alteryx should not be set higher than about 1GB. However there are several circumstances where you do not want to set the memory to the maximum:

 

  • Shared Servers: For a shared server, the system owner/IT person should set the memory to no more than (total memory-2G)/(Number of Users). This way if all the users are running modules at the same time the system won't go into virtual memory which really slows things down.
  • Web Servers: When running Alteryx on a web server, you really want to set the memory to the minimum possible without impacting the performance too much. I would recommend trying a system memory setting of 64MB and then increasing the memory on a per module basis as needed. It is important to note that the user setting for memory typically has no impact since the web service typically runs as a separate system user. Make sure to use the system settings.
  • Background Processing: Any time you are planning to run a module in the background while you are going to continue doing other work, it is a good idea to run it with less memory.

In any of the above usage scenarios, it is a good idea to check the box for running Alteryx at a lower priority. This will insure that the Alteryx Engine runs at a lower priority than all the other applications running on the same machine. This means that even the Alteryx Gui will remain responsive even when you are running a large module in the background. This is especially a good idea for a shared server.

 

It is also always a good idea to have the temporary directory point to a separate physical hard drive from your boot drive. If your temp drive points to C:\temp and you run a module that consumes 100's of GB of Temp space (it happens), your system may become unstable.

 

So all that said, how do I run my Alteryx? I have 8G of memory and run the 64 bit version, but I typically have lots of other apps open so I don't want it to use my memory.

 

I also want to run at a lower priority so that I can use my machine while it is processing.