Portfogio analyzer view: performance drop

[Jan M.]

Hello everyone!

I'm experiencing a performance drop when customizing my portfolio analyzer
view:

The view shows "work", "availability" and "remaining availability"
(calculated) for resources. Line fields show "department" (custom outline
code) and "resources". Column fields show "Year/month". From there, I drag
the "Projects" field to the right of "Resources", drill down to the last
level of "Department" and expand "Resources": this allows me to analyze
availability by department by resource, and workload by department by
resource by project in the same view.

Suppose I want to know how work is distributed among departments in all our
projects: I drag "Projects" to the left of "Department" and drill down to the
desired level. No problem until now!

Now I start "what if analyses": what would marketing remaining availability
be if I removed projects X,Y,Z and resources A,B? The moment I start
filtering projects and/or resources, the system slows down dramatically:

-Drop lists would take several seconds just to open or close
-Refreshing the chart would take up to one minute after dragging a field
-Windows task manager would indicate CPU usage increase (the Server CPU is
idle though)
-Windows task manager would indicate Internet explorer is not responding for
some time
-Things would get back to normal after I have removed all filters

There are less than 100 resources, and les than 50 projects in our database.
The initial date range of the cube was two years. I tried to rebuilding the
cube for only a week: no effects on performance.

Should I consider this behavior normal? Is our database too big??? Am I
asking for too much?

Thanks in advance

Jan M.

 

[Gary L. Chefetz [MVP]]

Jan:

I'd look at your usage of the time dimension. What's happening here is that
you're time-slicing too much data. Remove the time dimension and see if that
helps. Then add it back judiciously.

 

[Jan M.]

Gary, here are some observations I made:

1)Removing the time dimension before dragging helped a little but not much.
2)Placing one or two dimensions in the filter area instead of the row area
helped a little but not much.
3)Removing automatic filter really improved performance with dragging fields
from one area to another: refreshing the data is still slow when reapplying
the filter though.
4)The more fields there are in the view the slower the refresh.
5)The more fields are filtered the slower the refresh.
6)The fields with the more impact are "Projects" and "Resources", especially
when mixed and filtered in the same view.

My conclusion is that if I want to use the portfolio analyzer in a very
dynamic way(which is what I intended to do), I'm gonna have to limit the
number of dimensions in a particular view and use the filters very
judiciously.

Having read your books, I customized some project and resource outline codes
in order to use those custom attributes in the portfolio analyzer view. I
think the tool is very powerful, but I'm a bit disappointed with the
refreshing time at the "level of granularity" I consider useful.

Here's another question: The pivot table field list shows Assignment fields.
Dragging them in the chart seems to have no effect. What are they for and how
can I make good use of them?.

Thanks for taking the time.

Jan M.

 

[hbrown]

I see the same thing.
It would appear that the more filtering and/or the more custom fields are
used, the slower analyser cycles.

From what I saw about Project 2007, this has been changed. I'll certainly
want to try it out before I say fixed, but the demo was impressive.