Use the Render Profiler to Understand How Long Things Take To Calculate

Render is software engineer speak for the process of drawing something (e.g., a visualization) on a person's screen. If something is taking longer than .1 seconds (100MS) to render, you can view more detailed diagnostics by doing the following:

Click CTRL-SHIFT+ALT+1 on a PC, or CTRL-SHIFT+OPTION+1 on a Mac.
This causes the render profiler to appear. Then, perform some operation in the document (e.g., apply a filter) and you will see any slower outputs appear in the render profiler.
Perform some operation(s) in the document (e.g., apply a filter) and you will see any slower outputs appear in the render profiler. Once some items have loaded, they will appear in a tree view, where child items are items that were calculated by the item it is under. e.g. a calculation might need to recalculate the value of a variable, or some other calculation. There is a description of what was done for each item, as well as times taken. The times taken are colour coded (green is 100-200ms, orange is 200ms-1s and red is over 1s). The total time indicates the time taken for an item, and all of the things that item calculated.

In the example below, we can see that the chart took 250 milliseconds to compute in total, where 156 of these were to compute the chart itself. Prior to creating the chart,chart.5 needed to be created.

Before chart.5 could be created, PerformanceImportance.5, cola.importance.5, and table.Performace.by.Brand.5 needed to be computed. Each of these things in turn had inputs that needed to be computed.

Note that the times don't all add up to the overall time, this is because: