Best practices for increasing performance and reducing load times

This guide outlines key configuration options and performance tips to help you optimize your dashboards and datasets in Explo.

🧩 Dashboard Configuration Options

📌 Split Your Dashboard into Multiple Dashboards

If your dashboard feels cluttered or slow, consider breaking it into several smaller dashboards. This improves usability and load time by reducing the complexity on any single page.

📉 Reduce the Number of Charts per Dashboard

Too many visualizations can overwhelm users and negatively impact performance. Limit the number of charts per dashboard to the most essential insights.

🔍 Add Additional Filters

Filters allow users to drill down into data efficiently without requiring multiple dashboards. Use dropdowns, date selectors, and multi-select filters to offer flexibility without overwhelming the UI.

🗃 Database Connection Settings

🔗 Connection pooling and number of open connections

Explo maintains a set number of open connections to the database. Increasing this number can help with dashboard performance but may introduce some risks as well. For more information or if you'd like to update the number of open connections, click on the link here or reach out to the Explo team for help.

🚀 Improving Query Times

Optimizing query performance is key to a fast and responsive dashboard experience. Below are best practices you can apply both within and outside of Explo.

🛠 Within an Explo Dataset

• Avoid SELECT *
  Be specific in your queries. Example:

  sql

  CopyEdit

  SELECT id, col_1, col_2 FROM table_name;

  This reduces the amount of data transferred and parsed.

• Optimize Table Joins
  Always join smaller tables first to reduce memory usage and improve speed.

• Index Foreign Keys
  If you’re joining tables, indexing foreign key columns can greatly reduce lookup time.

🗄 Outside an Explo Dataset

• Use Materialized Views
  Move complex or compute-intensive queries upstream to materialized views in your database. This offloads processing from Explo and returns results faster.

• Index Frequently Filtered Fields
  Add indexes to database fields that users commonly filter by (e.g., dates, status fields).

• Enable Explo Caching
  Turn on Explo's built-in caching layer to improve load times for repeat queries.
  Learn more about caching here (link to be inserted).

🎨 Frontend & Visual Performance

🐢 Dashboard Sluggish or Laggy?

Slowness in the Explo dashboard UI is often caused by excessive data points in visualizations. 🔎

🔎 Look for certain visualizations that have too many data points shown:

• Limit the number of data points per chart

• Use aggregations to summarize large datasets

• Apply filters and pagination for large tables