Why is Designer so slow to execute?

Question

I'm running the simple tutorials, preparing for DP 100. I was wondering why the execution of Designer Pipelines is so slow, even when running very simple operations and minuscule DataFrames such as Automobile price data (Raw). I also may start working for a company that has been using Azure for Machine Learning and the interviewer commented something along the lines of being it very very slow.

If a very simple model training pipeline on a 200 records DataFrame took almost 20 minutes, I keep wondering how long it would take to compute a real world data pipeline.

Any insights? Thank you.

Answer 1

I can't believe it has been over 7 months since the first post in this thread and this fundamental issue still persists! As @ivangvi indicating, simply following Microsoft's own ML tutorial (here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/modules/create-regression-model-azure-machine-learning-designer/explore-data), takes 20 min just to apply a few simple transformation to a 205 row x 36 column dataset. Just removing one column took 5 min! The whole thing would take milliseconds in a local Jupiter notebook. Why would anyone ever use this? I'm baffled.

Answer 2

@ivangvi can you please check if your compute has spinned up or is a cold compute in this case? If you are running on a cold compute, it may take several minutes to spin up. Also Azure Machine Learning is running on the backend of Azure Machine Learning pipeline, so if your input data hasn't changed, next time pipeline is automatically using the cached result of that module so it should be fast compared with first time running time.

Answer 3

Designer is pretty interesting, but I agree: IT IS TOO SLOW. Unusably slow, unfortunately.

Answer 4

Same for me, I am experimenting with some Udacity courses that were created by MS, and the pipelines are so slow to the point of unbearabe. For on example the course says that the pipeline should take around 10 mins and the actual time was 50 mins. There was another case were my lab free time of 1hr elapsed and the pipeline didnt complete the execution....

Answer 5

I used to teach Azure Classic and it was great. Now, I need to switch to Azure Designer but it is too slow.