Smart Data Streaming: Improving Studio Performance

“I’m running streaming projects in HANA studio, and studio is slow! What can I do?”

Well, if you’re using 1.0 SP 12 (revision 122.07 or later), there are a few studio preferences that you can toggle to improve studio performance. By the way – this applies to anyone using smart data streaming in studio, even if you’re coming from Streaming Analytics on the SAP HANA Cloud Platform.

If you are using an older version of studio, then you won’t have access to preference #1, but you can still set the other three.

You can find these preferences in studio by going to Window > Preferences > SAP HANA smart data streaming > Run Test. Let’s go through them one by one.

1. Automatically reconnect to all projects when connecting to a server

A new preference in 1.0 SP 12 (revision 122.07 or later) lets you choose whether you want to automatically reconnect to all projects when connecting to a server. This preference is unchecked by default, so you must manually connect to or disconnect from each project to manage it, or to view current activity.

Disconnecting from a project won’t stop it from running. This preference ensures that multiple projects don’t connect all at once, enabling you to pick and choose what you want to load and view, and lowering the initial strain on resources.

2. Start previously running Run-Test perspective views on project start

Similarly, this preference keeps the studio startup load time to a minimum. Disabling it ensures that whatever you had open in the run-test perspective last time you connected to a project (such as Stream View) won’t reopen the next time you connect to that project. Again, you get to pick and choose what you want to open, and what you don’t – nothing will load automatically.

3. Pulse subscribe intervals

You’ll also want to ensure that the values for your pulse subscribe intervals are non-zero values. By default, StreamViewer pulsed subscribe interval (seconds) is set to 1, and Other pulsed subscribe interval (seconds) is set to 2. This preference tells studio how often to show updates in a stream, and setting it to 0 means that it will show all updates in real-time as they come, which can hurt performance. Conversely, raising these values can also help raise performance.

4. Filter metadata streams

When you do connect to a project, all the windows of that project load up alongside it. To keep this process quick and efficient, toggle on the filter metadata streams option in server view. This prevents any metadata streams from loading along with the input and output windows, and is easy to disable if you need to see those streams.

Above: Metadata stream filtering enabled.

Above: Metadata stream filtering disabled.