Engine Works
Under the hood of Alteryx: tips, tricks and how-tos.
The credit for asking for this feature goes to Adam Riley from the UK Alteryx Blog. This was a request from our Extend conference last March that he & I spent a good bit of time brainstorming. To be honest, I'm really not sure how we lived without it sooner.
The problem is that you have a big module and it is running slow and you don't know where to start optimizing it. For the most part, the only thing that makes Alteryx slow is lots of data right? But where exactly is that data. You start dropping browse tools all over the module trying to find the spot where you have GBs of data... Its easy to do, right? A misused transpose tool, or a bad Cartesian join can easily explode your data by an order of magnitude, but it can be difficult to find the spot.
You can see the (contrived) example to the right (click for a bigger image). Each connection has a bit of text saying how many records and how much size in data is passing through that connection – also the thickness of the connection reflects how much data flowed down that pipe. It is clear when most of the connections have a few thousand records and less than a MB of data where the problem is. The right side of the Append Fields tool is clearly hooked up to the wrong spot. This shows up in near real time while the module is running, so you can see problems even before it is complete. Optimizing modules got a whole lot easier.
Simple feature – big difference in usability. Thanks for the suggestion Adam.
