Slow performance when performing mathematical changes to data

Question

I have a report which produces several fields of data which takes about 10-20 seconds to produce. Rather than exporting the report to Excel and performing some analysis there I would like to perform some parts of it within DPA and thus reduce the number of fields/further processing required with the final report. However production of this data increases the report time to perhaps 30 minutes (since ultimately the report will do the same thing three times and run with about 10 servers the estimated running time of 15 hours is not reasonable).

I have added the following steps:

Copy one field.

Multiply copied field by 0.5.

Add the multiplied field to another field (twice).

This all seems like very basic stuff so it is unclear why it should take so much extra time to produce this data - if I export my report to Excel it would be instantaneous, so I'm curious about why performance doing this is so poor.

David_Hampson_90e289 · Answer

I was probably quick to jump to conclusions here; I left the report running over lunchtime and it still didn't run; I tested some reports that would run quickly and they all appeared to hang; it appeared there was some issue with the reporter service; having killed this off and restarted the service the report runs in 30-40 seconds now!

David_Hampson_90e289 · Answer

I have a suspicion that this problem may have occurred when encountering a divide by zero/null value.  The help for the Divide Fields operator states that there should be a field to set behaviour of a divide by zero condition but this is not displayed in this version 5.5.1

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Slow performance when performing mathematical changes to data

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