Troubleshoot | The Dataiku UI is slow to load for all users #

Troubleshooting steps #

This issue is impacting all users on the DSS server, so it’s probably not specific to a user’s environment or an individual project. At this point, you can perform some initial investigations of the DSS server. We can break this down into a couple of different steps:

  • Check resource usage on the DSS server. It’s always good to do some brief checks to see if you might be facing a resource issue on your server.

Run the following checks to see what processes are running on your DSS server and how much space you have available:

  • ps auxf

  • top

  • df -h

  • Do some initial investigation of the DSS backend logs.

DSS has detailed logging which can help you diagnose what might be happening. As a general tip, you can tail the backend logs if you are ever trying to identify what’s currently impacting the DSS server at a time of slowness:

tail -f <DATA_DIR>/run/backend.log

If you are seeing a slow UI issue specifically, you also might want to check if you are running into a garbage collection issue on the server. A quick way to do this is by running the following command:

grep -v JEK | grep -v FEK | grep “Full GC” <DATA_DIR>/run/backend.log

It’s common to see entries returned with this command, even if everything is fine on your DSS server. However, it is a problem if you are seeing that each entry consumes several seconds, as this will create a lag in the UI. For example, the following shows garbage collection entries that each take about 30 seconds:

36401.998: [Full GC (Allocation Failure) 12268M->12266M(12288M), 29.3987391 secs] 36431.480: [Full GC (Allocation Failure) 12268M->12266M(12288M), 39.1208729 secs] 36470.651: [Full GC (Allocation Failure) 12268M->12266M(12288M), 39.0166883 secs]

This means your DSS server is encountering a memory issue. Sometimes, this means that increasing your DSS backend.xmx memory setting is necessary.

It’s also possible that a user performed a particular action that caused a memory issue on the server. For example, let’s say a user attempted to view an entire 30GB dataset in the Explore tab of DSS by increasing the sample size setting to view the entire dataset.

This can cause a performance issue on the system.

You will want to educate your users on the reason why sample settings are set to a default of 10,000 to prevent any negative performance implications.