Making TM1 applications faster and lighter

There are three key principles that a IBM Planning Analytics powered by TM1 (TM1) developer needs to keep in mind when building TM1 applications:

• Design for Functionality: The solution must fulfill its design intent, make the solution intuitive.
• Design for Maintainability: Think beyond the immediate requirements, adhere to coherent design standards.
• Design for Performance: Leverage TM1’s unique strengths, avoid known performance bottlenecks.

There is a lot to talk about when designing for performance. Many TM1 components can be optimized to build a faster application:

• Rules optimization: 7 tips to writing faster rules
• Processes optimization: 4 ways to speed-up your processes
• Server optimization: Optimizing your TM1 server for performance

Another component that can be tuned is the cube optimization.

If you want to dig deeper into cube optimization, we recommend the following article:

• What exactly is cube optimization?

In TM1 there are multiple (and potentially different) “optimal dimension orders” for a cube:

• Optimal order for storage on disk
• Optimal order for size in memory
• Optimal order for view load time
• Optimal order for write-back

OptimusPy can help you to find quickly the optimal order for view load time and memory consumption.

OptimusPy determines the right dimension order based on the following theory: Higher positions in the dimension order drive the memory footprint of the cube, while the lower positions are a driver for the query speed (time to refresh a view).

OptimusPy will execute a cube view multiple times and change the dimensions order to find out the order with the fastest view and the lightest cube.

OptimusPy is a free, open-source and very easy to install. The following article will guide you step by step through your first execution of OptimusPy:

• Analyzing your TM1 application with Arc
• Why it’s vital to monitor the health of your TM1 system
• Understand relationships within your TM1 model