By: Eric Parker
Eric Parker lives in Seattle and has been teaching Tableau and Alteryx since 2014. He's helped thousands of students solve their most pressing problems. If you have a question, feel free to reach out to him directly via email.
My computer was getting bogged down recently. My 3.5 year old Microsoft Surface Pro was down to 8 GB left in the 237 GB hard drive.
(Notice I now have almost 100 GB available). Select “This PC” in your file explorer to see your available memory.
I started doing some digging and learned that you can easily search files by size to find the largest files on your computer.
What you can do is go to your file explorer, type “Size:” into the search and then pick a size option.
Check out what I saw when I searched large files on my computer.
I found there are two main ways that Tableau was eating up space on my PC.
First, there are all the old install files for previous versions of Tableau. Those are about ¼ or ⅓ of a GB each. Let’s say I get a new install file once a month (for full or sub-version updates). That adds up to several GBs per year quickly.
There are also a number of .dmp files. I looked those up and they are temporary memory store files that Tableau creates when the application crashes. I presume this is how it can load your work even if it was unsaved. However, these files are large! Anywhere between ¼ to ½ of a GB in my experience. Those files were eating up dozens of GBs of space for me. Long-term, you don’t need to keep those files around and can delete them.
I hope this helps you free up space and speed up your computer as well!