Alteryx Hardware Utilization and Performance Bottleneck

[WeiLi]

Hi Community,

I am wondering what the community's thoughts and suggestions are as to optimizing Alteryx for hardware utilization and where the common bottlenecks are. What I mean is that I find Alteryx, even with AMP on, it does not seem to fully utilize hardware.

The image below shows the hardware utilization when running this week's Weekly Challenge. You can see the hardware does not appear to be at its limit, but Alteryx seems to be capped out somewhere. The CPU is only 24% utilized and none of the cores are near max. Memory usage is under 2GB when 6GB was allocated to Alteryx. And neither the SSD nor the GPU are utilized for this. So where's the performance bottleneck?

 

[alexnajm]

One of the best ways to find bottlenecks is by enabling Performance Profiling in your Runtime settings! That way you can see how long each individual tools takes to run. You may also want to turn on “Show Macro Messages” in that same tab. 

Otherwise the second thing I would’ve done is what you mentioned - overriding the memory limits in the User Settings. I am not sure why Alteryx isn’t using more, but I would look at memory rather than CPU. 

[ChrisTX]

Have you tried running it with AMP off?

See this thread that talks about AMP (but on the server).  

AMP's heavy usage of multi-threading

Alteryx Server – AMP is slowing down server? - Alteryx Community

Chris

[WeiLi]

@ChrisTX - Your suggestion is very interesting. See results below. CPU usage jumped to 100% but memory usage has fallen to 350MB. compared to AMP ON, CPU usage was 24% and memory usage was about 1.8GB. i've not noticed a significant difference in final performance speed between AMP ON vs AMP OFF. it seems that AMP ON is trying to improve performance, but some other limit is preventing it from using more system resources.

 

 

[WeiLi]

bumping this. does any Alteryx dev team members know how to compel Alteryx to use up more resources to more fully utilize existing CPU / memory available?

asking this, because i have worflows that can take hours to run and it really sucks to see CPU 24% occupied.

i am willing to throw more CPU's / RAM at the problem, as long as Alteryx is capable of using it.

[ChrisTX]

One more suggestion:  see this link which has a little information about Resource Utilization:

Knowledge Base / Designer / Tips & Tricks 2016: Workflow Optimization

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Knowledge-Base/Tips-amp-Tricks-2016-Workflow-Optimization/t...

And consider creating an Alteryx support ticket to ask for options to improve total run time.

Chris