Exploring Best Practice for Performance

In addition to creating visibly appealing and meaningful stories, following basic standards can also help improve the performance of your stories, from how quickly the widgets render on a page to how long it takes to scroll through a table.

While there are no specific limits on the number of charts per story or data cells per table, following the KISS principle--Keep It So Simple--is the best guideline to follow.

Here are a few general guidelines to keep in mind as you create stories in SAP Analytics Cloud. Remember, these are guidelines, not rules. There will always be an exception.

• Rather than designing a large story with many pages, try to limit your pages and create different stories for each use-case or audience. If you want to refer to a related story, you can add a hyperlink to a different page, story, or external website.
• Use pages to break up your story by category or type of information. Put your most-viewed content on the first page to make it easily accessible.
• Try to keep the number of individual widgets on each page of your story limited to six or less. Multiple widgets per page are certainly allowed, but an extremely high number of widgets in a page may affect the refresh time for a story.
• Avoid charts with more than 500 data points.
• Load invisible widgets in the background from the Edit area of the toolbar, Refresh→Loading Optimization Settings then choose Background Loading from the dropdown.
• Apply chart filters to reduce the volume of information in charts with more than 1000+ data points and use table filters to keep a manageable amount of information visible in your tables.
• Apply the Top N feature to charts and tables to limit initially the amount of data displayed at one time.
• When adding tables to your story, keep in mind the goal of the table and ensure that viewers can easily navigate the information. To help ensure readability, try to limit your tables to a maximum of 500 rows and 60 columns. If you need to display more, you can edit the drill limitation. Keep in mind that the more cells you include, the harder SAP Analytics Cloud must work to display them.
• If a table is based on planning model but is used strictly for analysis, deselect Planning Enabled in the Builder panel for the table.
• When adding images to your pages, ensure that the images are sized for web and are smaller than 1MB. SVG vectors image files still look great at a small file size. If you cannot use an SVG image file, PNG image files perform better than JPG.
• When working with blended data, avoid creating linked dimensions on calculated dimensions. Keeping the number of models linked in each story at a minimum will also improve overall speed and performance.
• Limit the number of data-rich widgets on each page like maps or charts with a high volume of data points. Overloading your pages with dense information will make it harder for your viewers to consume and may slow load-time.
• For a dimension with a large hierarchy and an ALL node, collapse the hierarchy and/or use the drill capability, even in input controls.
• Be aware of progressive chart rendering, which enables chart widgets to display more quickly when a story is opened a subsequent time (within an hour). This setting is enabled by administrators.
• For tables with large amounts of data, avoid Styling Rules.
• In your computer settings, enable the High Performance power plan if scrolling in tables is slow.

For more information on performance considerations and optimizing story performance in SAP Analytics Cloud, please visit the Managing Performance in SAP Analytics Cloud learning journey.