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michaelsh
Kudo Kingpin
Kudo Kingpin

Everything I do is sloooow and delayed in Desktop

I work on a model with lots of measures and visuals including recent smart texbox.

Recently everything started to  be like in a slow motion:

I click on a measue, and it takes 4-5 seconds just to let me edit it.

I click on a visual and it selects it after 5 seconds.

I have lots of free memory and free CPU and no disk usage - looks great.

I disabled background refresh for PQ.

What slows it down - measures? calc columns? visuals?

It is slow even it finished to show all the visuals (it happens pretty fast -4-5 sec a page)

I need a very specific answer please, not general recommendations, because I cannot play around with it - its a lot of work.

Thank you

11 REPLIES 11
michaelsh
Kudo Kingpin
Kudo Kingpin

Thank you all for answering. 
Here is an update:

I closed and re-opened the file and it started working fast again. 
I am in the middle of many changes and creating measures and visuals. So as I continue to work - it keeps slowing down. 
when I re-open, it is fast again. 
I understand there is no silver bullet. But I eliminate: the overall size, slow measures, power query, none of these seems to be an issue. I don't think DAX studio or Performance Analyzer will help me. I feel it is something going on inside Power BI while I keep changing / adding stuff. 
Has anyone experience anything similar?

Hi @michaelsh,

 

I have observed two things from your post, first, you are using a custom visual (not certified) which is taking more time to render in your report. You can check this from the Power BI desktop analyzer how much time it is takin to load the data into the visual.

 

Second, you need to split the visuals into pages, don't put all the visuals on one page, as visuals are interacting in nature.

Use filter option in Power BI desktop to restrict the data as per your report or model design and hence it will reduce the data size.
Also, take the advantage of Profiler in the power query editor so that you can filter the blanks and empty rows.

Sometimes, it's good to restart and run the Power BI instance on your PC. Make sure visuals should render properly in less time once you publish it to power bi service. because your report will be consumed from the power bi service.

 

I've not experienced this. How much RAM does your PC have? Mine has 16GB and I've never had this issue, but I don't work with MASSIVE models. It seems your PC is running out of resources, which seems bolstered by the fact that closing and restarting Power BI fixes it for a while.



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@edhans 

I have plenty of unused resources as I have described in the original post.
That's exactly what doesn't make sense. 
I had model that were big and took 100% memory. 
This is not the case here. It's like when time passes as I am working it gradually slows down the reaction of application itself, not calculations. 
Still lots of memory/CPU/available. 
...

?

Are you using any custom visuals? I am wondering if one has a resource leak. I've never seen this happen in working with Power BI over the years, but I stick to the standard visuals and a very few custom visuals, like the Chicklet Slicer and a few others.



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@edhans 

All are standard visuals.

I do use Smart Narrative which is in Preview.

It uses AI stuff, so maybe it is the problem... ?

But shouldn't I then see 100% CPU or memory?

The computer resources are fine. All other apps work great, just Power BI lags...

By resources @michaelsh it can be things you don't see in Task manager. Open handles, extra data cached to the HD that the app really doesn't need but is still tracking. etc. 

I am not saying that it is a resource issue, just that it can be, though that seems pretty unlikely if you are just using MS visuals. They test pretty thoroughly. 

 

Has it improved any since the Oct 2020 update came out?



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rogletree
Helper III
Helper III

Not sure if this is considered bad practice....but if you go to "file" -> "Options and Settings" -> "Options" -> "Data Load"  then under "Data Cache Management Options" you can change the "Maximum allowed (MB)" to a higher setting. It's 4096 by default, which is 4 GB, so assuming you have at least like 12GB of RAM on your machine, you could double it to like 8192 and it may improve the performance.

I haven't changed mine but I've heard this has helped some people.

The Data Cache Management Options setting is how much of your local hard drive do you want to allow Power Query to cache data to increase performance of query design. My understanding is it has nothing to do with the data model itself, nor anything on the service. Just makes PQ design go a bit faster. Doesn't have anything to do with RAM.

The default of 4GB is well above the service allowance of 1GB for a Pro license, so it is strictly a local thing.



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edhans
Super User
Super User

"I need a very specific answer please, not general recommendations, because I cannot play around with it - its a lot of work."

 

Unfortunately there is no silver bullet to this. You can try viewing the metrics in DAX Studio for the file and see if you have any absurdly large data. Calculated columns are generally a bad thing, and if your model has a lot of them, it can slow it down. You might also be using automatic time intelligence or an unfiltered CALENDARAUTO() which is also bad. Both can cause millions of rows to be added to date tables depending on your source system.

 

2020-10-16 10_20_50-DaxStudio - 2.12.2.png

There is a 1 hour video by Marco Russo on using DAX Studio to find and troubleshoot performance issues here.

 

You are going to have to dig for it. Absurdly large tables and calculated columns can be the first place to look, but other than that, you'll need to go through each issue one at a time - individual measure performance, visual performance, number of visuals on a page, etc.



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collinq
Super User
Super User

Hi @michaelsh ,

 

Slowness is one of the hardest thing to diagnose as there are so many variables (not all of them even being within Power BI).  I would suggest that you use the Performance Analyzer and see if you glean anything from that.  If you do not, then you probably need to open a ticket and have Microsoft help you diagnose the exact issue(s).

 

I would appreciate Kudos if my response was helpful. I would also appreciate it if you would Mark this As a Solution if it solved the problem. Thanks!



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