When to Add Nodes and Reconfigure

Tableau Server can scale up and out as your needs and requirements evolve. Here are some guidelines to help you figure out whether it’s time to add more nodes to your system, reconfigure the server, or both:

  • More than 100 concurrent users: If your deployment is user-intensive (>100 simultaneous viewers), it’s important to have enough VizQL processes—but not so many that they exceed your hardware’s capacity to handle them. Also, enabling the Tableau Server Guest User account can increase the number of potential simultaneous viewers beyond the user list you may think you have. The administrative view can help you gauge this. For more information, see Actions by Specific User.

  • Heavy use of extracts and frequent extract refreshes: Extracts can consume a lot of memory and CPU resources. There’s no one measurement that qualifies a site as extract-intensive. Having just a few, extremely large extracts could put your site in this category, as would having very many small extracts. Sites where extracts are frequently refreshed (for example, several times a day) are often helped by more emphasis on the background process, which handles refresh tasks. Use the Background Tasks for Extracts administrative view to see your current refresh rate. Extract heavy sites benefit from isolating the Backgrounder process on its own machine. For more information, see the two-node configuration in the Recommended Baseline Configurations topic.

  • Query heavy environments: If you are experiencing slow query performance for Workbooks that use extracts, isolating nodes that handle queries on extracts from VizQL processes can improve and stabilize performance. For more information, see Optimize for Extract Query-Heavy Environments.

  • Downtime potential: If your server system is considered mission critical and requires a high level of availability, you can configure it so there’s redundancy for the server processes that handle extracts, the repository, and the gateway.

Thanks for your feedback!Your feedback has been successfully submitted. Thank you!