If decreasing processing time is important for your application, you may wish to investigate some of the following options.
1. Use the 64-bit Version
Forecast Pro can be installed as either a 32-bit or 64-bit application. If you are currently running the 32-bit version, migrating to the 64-bit version will speed up various operations such as opening and saving projects and will also allow you to work with larger data sets.
2. Work Locally
Working with projects stored on a network drive can be substantially slower than working on a project stored locally. Reading input data over the network and saving output files to network drives can also be substantially slower than reading and writing from a local drive, as the network is often the performance bottleneck.
If you are currently saving your projects to a network drive, saving them to a local drive will improve performance considerably. If you are currently reading your input data from a network drive and/or saving output files to a network drive, moving them to a local drive will speed up read/write operations considerably.
3. Use Zipped Projects
As we mentioned above, in some networked environments, working with projects stored on a network drive can be substantially slower than working on a project stored locally. To improve performance in these cases, Forecast Pro supports “zipped” projects to reduce the amount of data that needs to be passed through the network. When you save a zipped project, Forecast Pro zips the four standard project files described in a previous section of this manual into a single file with the extension .FPZip.
When you open a zipped project, Forecast Pro copies the zipped file from the network drive to a local workspace, unzips the project files and opens the project—allowing you to work on your project locally, even though it was saved to a network drive. When you resave your zipped project, Forecast Pro will zip the updated local project files and save the updated .FPZip file to the network drive.
To save and open zipped projects, you select FPZip as the file type in the File>Save as and File>Open dialog boxes.
4. Upgrade Your Hardware
Upgrading your hardware will improve performance dramatically. Forecast Pro will run on any Intel processor. Since this product deals with large amounts of floating point data, it makes sense to run it on as fast a machine as possible.
As an illustration, using expert selection and four years of monthly history per item, a Core2/2.2GHz machine forecasted 10,000 items in 39 seconds. The same run took 4 minutes on a Pentium III/600MHz machine and 24 minutes on a Pentium/90MHz.
Having enough RAM is also important—we recommend 2 Gigs if you are running a 32-bit operating system and as much RAM as your budget can afford if you are running a 64-bit operating system.
As you use the program, Forecast Pro is storing and retrieving a great deal of information in memory. If you do not have an adequate amount of RAM Forecast Pro will resort to using virtual memory (i.e., caching to your hard drive). This is substantially slower than using RAM. Increasing the amount of RAM in your computer will improve performance for all applications.
Use a Solid State hard drive, ideally with PCIe storage (virtualizing RAM with this type of hard drive is significantly faster). This will improve the read/write times which should make program performance for certain operations more efficient (e.g. opening and saving projects, as well as reading in/saving data files).
5. Use Manual Override Mode
If you make overrides to large complex hierarchies, the reconciliation can take a time. To defer this time consuming reconciliation, Forecast Pro supports a manual override mode. When this mode is active, the override window will include a Retain button as well as a Commit Button. The Retain button is used to accept overrides without reconciling the hierarchy. In this mode you would typically enter and retain all of the overrides you wish to make (i.e., for multiple items) and then click Commit or the Recalculate icon on the Home tab to perform the reconciliation. The control to turn on manual override mode is found on the Performance tab of the Options dialog box.
6. Use Manual Forecast Mode
By default, Forecast Pro will automatically recalculate the forecasts and re-reconcile the relevant nodes of the hierarchy every time you apply a forecast modifier. For large hierarchies this can be time consuming. Forecast Pro allows you turn on manual recalculation using an option of the Performance tab of the Settings>Options menu. If you turn this option off, when you specify a forecast modifier the forecasts will not be updated until you click the Recalculate icon on the Home tab. This allows you to specify multiple forecast modifiers without having to wait for the program to recalculate the forecasts in between each specification. The control to turn on manual forecast mode is found on the Performance tab of the Options dialog box.
8. Optimize Outlier Detection and Correction for Speed
The outlier detection and correction algorithm will slow down the processing. If you wish to use outlier detection and correction but speed is of concern, one option is to initially run the forecasts in the detection only mode to detect the outliers and then turn outlier detection off and use the \OUTLIER=CORRECT modifier to perform the corrections on the detected items.
9. Don’t Use xlsx Files
If you are using xlsx files you might consider switching to csv or xls files. Xlsx files are slower to read than csv and xls files and use over twice as much memory. Also, if you are using large spreadsheet files breaking them up into several smaller files or increasing the amount of RAM available will speed up processing.
10. Optimize Model Selection for Speed
Specifying “Exclude machine learning” on the Performance tab of the Options dialog box will speed up forecast generation considerably. This option will remove machine learning models from consideration when using expert selection.
If you are forecasting data where the number of periods per cycle is greater than 13 (e.g., weekly data) you might consider turning on the “Exclude seasonal simplification” option in the Performance tab of the Options dialog box. If this switch is on (it is on by default), Forecast Pro’s expert selection mode will not consider seasonally simplified forms of exponential smoothing models. This will speed up forecast generation considerably.
Specifying the models to use rather than using the expert selection will substantially improve performance. This will require some work to determine the best type of model to use for your data. The best way to determine the appropriate model for your data set is to experiment using the forecast evaluation procedures (see methodology chapter in the Forecast Pro Statistical Reference Manual for details).
11. Use Year over Year view of the history in the Override grid instead of Time Series view
The Time Series view of the history in the Override grid allows you to enter formulas in Calculated Rows for historic periods. This may slow down override reconciliation, as the entire override grid must be recalculated each time an override is committed. Consider limiting the number and complexity of the formulas being used, or consider using Year over Year view of the history when committing overrides.