Performance Tuning FME: FME Updates and Improvements

Introduction

As FME is developed and refined over time, it gains a number of performance improvements. These can be classified as two different types of upgrades:

• An automatic upgrade is one that is applied to the FME engine as you upgrade the FME version. These performance improvements are used automatically. They are backward compatible and won't change the behavior of a workspace, just its performance.
• A premeditated upgrade is one that is initiated by the FME user. These performance improvements become available as you upgrade FME, but aren't used automatically. They may or may not be backward compatible, so it is important that you be aware of any differences before applying them.

 
For other performance tuning tips & tricks, see Performance Tuning FME.
 

Automatic Upgrades

Upgrading to the newest major or minor release may improve performance. To learn more about the various performance improvements for each version of FME, see the Change Log associated with each download. 

Premeditated Upgrades

Whenever you upgrade to a newer version of FME, you can open a workspace and look for a section of the Navigator window labeled Upgradable Transformers.


These are optional upgrades that you can apply to a transformer. You should check the changelog for the transformer (available when you carry out the upgrade) to see if there are any changes that might affect the results of the transformer.
In general, if the changelog includes the phrase:

Added support for Bulk Mode

...then you should get a decent improvement in performance, like with this StatisticsCalculator in 2020:


In fact, the StatisticsCalculator in FME 2020 is on average 88% faster than prior versions, with some cases running 100 times faster! Those are official numbers from our QA team.
But as you can see, there are many other updates to the transformer, and you should check these to ensure they won't interfere with your expected results.
What's even better is that the performance benefit might even extend beyond that particular transformer, to the rest of the workspace. That's because a transformer that doesn't support Bulk Mode can cause the rest of the workspace to revert to an older, less efficient method of processing.
So upgrading one transformer to support bulk mode can cause all subsequent transformers to start operating in bulk mode too!