Do hidden visuals impact performance

[cnweke]

TL;DR: When is the data for hidden visuals queried? Upon display of the visual or upon opening the page/report?

Also in the spirit of teaching a man how to fish, how would I be able to find this out myself?

Hi community,

I've seen similar threads without a (clear) answer so I'll re-ask. 

I'm making a report which analyses one fact table consisting of 4 simple measures. This measure is connected to around 15 dimensions in SSAS (star schema). As of now I have about 10-15 slicers (attributes) with each a ton of elements I may want to filter on.

In order to do this efficiently and make it intuitive for the end user I have 1 control screen with most of the slicers. The second screen has my 4 measures and another set of slicers that are domain specific. In order to give the users more options I included 2 buttons with bookmarks that swap my visuals (3 in total) from i.e. sales per region to sales per product. I may add more for plant, sales office, ... later on.

My main concern is whether or not Power BI queries the source, through ssas, for  just 3 graphs (the visisble ones) or 6 in total (visible + hidden). Reason being that I want to make something scalable, as of now I'm only working with a small subset of data (4m rows). I'll be willing to increase it to 150m+ (actual size as of today) in the future. I also may add extra hidden visuals which could exponentially hinder performance. 

If the hindrance is substantial I'll just change up strategy and move from 1-2 report pages to several.

Thanks in advance!

[marcoselias]

Hello @cnweke ,

I believe your question was answered from the data collection or data prep point of view, but it wasn't addressed from the visuals rendering point of view. I had the same question as you did and found that hidden visuals do not impact performance. At least doesn't seem like they do in Power BI Desktop and I assume the same applies in Power BI Service. Hope my solution below helps you test it for yourself and don't forget to flag as a solution if it works for you.

In my case, I have two matrix visuals. Depending on which report bookmarks the user selects, one visual will be hidden while the other one is shown. The quota source for both visuals is the same, so nothing to do from the Query Editor/Power Query side. The difference between the two matrix visuals is simply the list of fields that get displayed.

To review the performance impact of your visuals, you can open the Performance analyzer (View > Performance analyzer). It's located in the 'Show panes' grouping of the ribbon in Power BI Desktop. Once it opens, click on Start recording and you can change pages, refresh visuals, or (like in my case) click on the different bookmarks to have the Performance analyzer review the impact of refreshing each visual in the active page. In the results of the analyzer you will see that the hidden visuals do not impact performance.

Here's more information on the Performance analyzer:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/desktop-performance-analyzer

Hope I answered your question.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Advocate IV

i was wondering the same, i have gruops of visuals hidden, that shows up with bookmarks. its great the dont affect performance of rendering a page report. 

[v-xicai · Accepted solution]

Hi @cnweke ,

By Default all queries in Power Query will be loaded into the Power BI model, and consume memory. Even when you hide visual ,the query will still consume the memory and affect performance. The best approach is to disable loading in Query Editor. select the query and right click, Click on the Enable Load to disable it, then click "Apply &Close", the query won't been seem in Report View, Data View, and Model View.

Disabling Load doesn’t mean the query won’t be refreshed, it only means the query won’t be loaded into the memory. When you click on Refresh model in Power BI, or when a scheduled refresh happens even queries marked as Disable Load will be refreshed, but their data will be used as intermediate source for other queries instead of loading directly into the model. 

Best Regards,

Amy

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.