Looking to get the most out of your dashboard Performance? Here’s our best advice
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Keep it simple and avoid creating boards with a high number of large widgets
If you notice slowness on your boards consider splitting the information into multiple boards There are two main benefits of having multiple boards:
Performance
The more data that is showing, the longer the board will take to load. It will also take longer to update when you make changes to the board selectors.
Readability
Cluttering the Board with information will only detract from what’s important. If groups of end-users have significantly different requirements, it might be easier to have separate Boards for each group.
Instead of having one board with lots of widgets, it is usually better to split these across multiple boards with buttons to navigate between. A rough rule is you should have a maximum of 3 or 4 scrolls in board length (ideally less).
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Avoid massive views on boards
Where possible avoid having lots of visible rows/columns.
Optimize large views to look at only certain items at one time. For example, only showing one Region at a time. If you want to see the global view and each region, you can have a global widget and a regional widget.
For example:
We have:
- 20 Regions
- 200 Business Units
- 10,000 Products
- 5 Year calendar
In a specific dashboard the user wants to be able to expand a region, to see all the business units within that region, then also have the ability to expand the business unit and see the values of all the products sold by that business unit. This one dashboard will be accessed by end users from every region (who can only see their region) as well as group controllers (who can see all regions).
One way to execute this requirement would be to have one widget with all Products, Business Units, Regions in rows and all Months in columns.
The impact of the above would be a massive view (> 50m cells displayed). This view alone could be relatively slow (taking 10 seconds + to load) depending on the data. In the same dashboard if you have many views like this it will have an impact on the load time and navigation of the dashboard.
An alternative approach to have near instant load times is the following:
- Regional Summary to get the overview by Region to display an aggregated view.
- Product Breakdown by Region: One Region shown at a time limiting the number of rows on display.
- Year Board selector changed to single selector so only one year’s data is shown at a time.
3. Consider disabling dynamic pages to improve page selector load times
Dynamic pages is a feature where you have multiple page selectors composed of lists that are grouped together, and your selection options will update dynamically based upon selection. For example, if I have Quarters as a page selector and Months as a page selector, when I choose one quarter, my month options will update to only show me months within that quarter.
On Boards that contain huge amounts of data with long dimension lists, dynamic pages can lead to longer load times. In extreme cases it can take 5-10 seconds to expand the selector once clicked on. If dynamic pages aren’t an important feature, disabling it can bring back board selector load times to be instantaneous.
For a step by step guide on how to disable dynamic pages, click the “Using Page Selector” Link at the bottom of the page.
Do you have any other tips for the pigment community? Have any questions on board performance? Let us know in the comments below.
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Top Tips for modeling in Pigment - Part 3: Board Design
Top Tips for modeling in Pigment - Part 2: Performance Optimisation
Using Page Selectors to customize the context in your Views and Boards