Configure Photon Client

Trifacta Photon client is the in-browser engine for management of sampling and transformation in the Transformer page. Trifacta Photon is automatically downloaded and updated in each user's web browser when accessing the Transformer page. Within the browser, Photon is used to manage sampling and to process transformations on those samples on the local web client, which limits required interactions with the Alteryx® node. 

Features:

• Larger sample sizes (up to 10MB by default).

  NOTE: Since Trifacta Photon supports larger sample sizes, some interactions may be slightly impacted. Loading states have been introduced to enable faster responsiveness from the application.

  Tip: For datasets that are smaller than the sample size limit, the Transformer Page displays the entire dataset in its transformed state. So, you can download the dataset from the Recipe Panel in Transformer Page without having to execute it on a remote server. This expanded capability allows for faster and more immediate local use of the product. See Recipe Panel.

This section contains the user-facing configuration for the Trifacta Photon client. Except as noted below, these configuration changes are applied to the Alteryx node, which then applies the configuration to each instance of the Trifacta Photon client and its interactions with the node.

Known Limitations

• None

Choose Web Client

The Designer Cloud Powered by Trifacta platform supports the following web clients for interacting with the Trifacta Photon client through the Google Chrome browser:

Please complete the following steps to enable the PNaCl web client for use with the Trifacta Photon client.

Steps:

1. You can apply this change through the Admin Settings Page (recommended) or trifacta-conf.json. For more information, see Platform Configuration Methods.

2. To enable Photon, apply the following configuration settings: 

   "photon.enabled": true,
   "photon.mode": "pnacl",

3. Save your changes and restart the platform.

Recommended Photon Configuration by Core Count

On the Alteryx node, you can make adjustments to the resources claimed by the Photon running environment based on the number of cores on the machine. The following table identifies the recommended settings for a node with 8, 16, or 32 cores. The default settings assume 16 cores.

The number of simultaneous users is a competing factor.

• For a high number, more resources should be reserved for the webapp and the VFS services.
• For a low number, more resources for Photon should improve performance for sampling and job execution on the Trifacta Photon running environment.

The following table illustrates some adjustments for a 16-core system:

Modify Limits

Sample Size Limits

Increasing the sample size may degrade the user experience in the Transformer page in the following ways:

• Generation of column details and data grid histograms
• Preview card loading time

• Time required to complete brushing and linking in histograms

  NOTE: If you increase the sample size above the default setting and encounter unacceptable performance in the above areas, you should reduce the sample size settings.

When samples are created using the Trifacta Photon running environment, their maximum size is determined by the following parameter. Default value is 10 MB.

"webapp.client.loadLimit": 10485760,

Maximum Data in the Client

The following parameter determines the maximum amount of data that is permitted to be passed to the browser from the Trifacta Photon client:

"webapp.client.maxResultsBytes": 41943040,

Use Photon Client

The Trifacta Photon client is an embedded component of the web client. Access to it is transparent to the user.

Configure VFS Service

Photon interacts with backend datastores through the VFS service.

For more information, see Configure VFS Service.