Dashboard rendering bottleneck: 1s Query execution but 10s "Processing" on a single table tile

Looker Q&A Looker
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I’m seeking advice on a performance bottleneck within a customer-facing dashboard. The dashboard contains 12 tiles, including merged results, cross-filters, and custom visualizations.

I’ve identified a specific table visualization (5,000 rows) that is causing the entire dashboard to hang. The SQL for this tile executes in less than 1 second, but the dashboard shows it “Processing Results” for over 10 seconds. Crucially, the other 11 tiles remain in a “Queued” or “Loading” state and refuse to render until this specific table has finished its 10-second processing phase—even though their own queries have already finished in under 3 seconds.

It appears the browser’s main thread is being blocked by the DOM-heavy rendering of the 5,000-row table, preventing Looker from drawing the lighter tiles simultaneously.

Has anyone found a way to:

  1. Prevent a single large tile from “hogging” the rendering queue?

  2. Force the lighter tiles (Single Values, Charts) to render while the heavy table is still processing?

  3. Optimize the “Processing” phase for large tables beyond just reducing the row limit?

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