Power BI Desktop freezes 10 times a day

[PVO3]

Hi all,

I'll try to explain the issue I'm having. 

Power BI runs fine, until a random moment. Perhapse I change something in a visual or a measure, but then all my visuals start to refresh and in 90% of the time they don't recover at all and Power BI simply freezes. Sometimes I even have to do a hard reboot. The changes I'm making are very small.

I sometimes I have the idea it has something to do with IntelliSense and/or Microsoft Edge Webview2. Yesterday I was typing a DAX syntax and by pressing tab, it took the suggested function. Every single time I did this, Power BI desktop frooze. Also, sometimes it generates multiple Webview2 processen (screenshot). 

It's pretty much impossible to work at the moment. Using the most recent PBI December 2021 desktop update.

Is there a fix for this?

[RobertHind_TF]

Just a note …. The issues I’ve experienced so far have not been to do with “starting” Power BI.

There is no problem starting Power BI OR opening a dataset or report.

The problem occurs later – rarely immediately

[jaap_olsthoorn]

I'm with Robert, your description of the issue (about "starting" and "crashing") do not match my experience. Also, I dont understand that people keep talking about the webview2 stuff, even though disabling it in the preview settings doesn't fix the issue at all, at least not for me. It happens just as much with CEFsharp.

There are no crash logs because the program does not crash, it hangs/freezes. I have to kill it, which does not produce a crash log.

Here is an image of what it looks like when the program hangs. Everything looks fine, but there is a spinning indicator on the visuals that require calculations, and all interactivity with the powerBI program is impossible.

(If I has to hazard a guess as to what is wrong, I think there might be something like a connection token between desktop and on the service, that connects your local instance to the powerBI resource in the cloud (in my case, a gateway). That token expires or is invalidated in some way, and powerBI desktop doesn't handle that well, attempts to establish a connection but fails, and gives up, instead of retrying. This is what the bug feels like)

[boosalis]

Crashes occur for me as I try to configure buttons, bookmarks, navigation, and actions. 32gb ram, Win10, Radeon 510...should be enough to avoid multiple crashes, I'd think.

[FritzVPL]

Same here, experiencing indefinite hangs and freezes and it doesn't occur when starting. The reccomended work arounds have not helped. Only sometimes closing the file from the taskbar and hitting cancel works. Usually occurs when attempting to filter data by using a slicer/interacting with a visual/refreshing the live connecting ect. Seems to happen more often when Power BI is idle for a few minutes. 

My use case is live connecting to a fairly large data model in a premium workspace.

Likely a separate issue but some trivial things just hang up my desktop files while working in them for a long time. For instance working in the PBI file with the data model I created a simple measure and went to move it to the proper folder. Hung up the file for over 5 minutes to move the measure to the correct table. I repeat the exact same process after it finishes and it takes 2 seconds the 2nd time. My memory/cpu are not being maxed out/affecting this inconsistency. 

[boosalis]

Hi FritzVPL,

My current projects are tiny in comparision to yours, yet I am experiencing the same troubles. PBI crashes sometimes even if I am just thinking about formating a button.  

The autorecovery also leaves much to be desired. After a crash, it is usually easier for me just to start over again.

I am in formatting hell. 

[Shelley]

After I turned off the preview feature, it still crashed on me, but after a day or so, it does seem to have gotten better for me. I don't think it's crashed since (for a week, maybe); however, there are times when it is really slow to do something and I think it's crashing, but then it recovers.

[Anonymous]

As temporary solution we moved back to November 2021 version and we don't see the freeze that frequently.

[boosalis]

That sounds reasonable. I may try that depending on how things go today when I begin again. Thank you.

[saj]

Same issue here. We have had reports from a number of Desktop users who connect live to small datasets.

They work fine for a period of time and then make a subtle change to a slicer and all visuals just have the 'egg timer' (showing my age) which never completes.

I witnessed it myself this morning when I started a Power BI desktop session; linked to a dataset and did a little bit of work.

I had to do some other work in other applications and when I returned to Power BI the freeze occurred.

All of Power BI desktop is frozen without obvious mechanism to get it back other than killing Power BI desktop.

[jaap_olsthoorn]

Hey all, I don't think MS is having much luck. Maybe it's time for us to write down some of our setup details, so as to find a common denominator that causes this issue for us:

Local: 

Connection type of local report: Power BI Dataset in PowerBI Service

File size of Report: 4.3 MB

PowerBI Infrastructure Update: OFF

Webview 2 environment variable: Set to 0

Service:

Connection type of report in service: PostgreSQL

Using Gateway: Yes, December 2021

File size of Dataset in Service: 50MB

Details of Issue:

Freezing with visual loading icon twirling. Impossible to interact with report. Never crashing to desktop, just freezing.