Mashup container freezes server

[Phobos1]

Every half hour processes are kicking off that consume so much CPU that the entire reporting server freezes. Mashup container is running a series of processes that consume all of the server's capacity. Is there a timer on this thing, can it be turned off? I have disabled the background load in all reports to no avail. Can't find any intel online on what these processes are doing or why it is happening in a 30 minute interval.

[josef78]

You can check scheduled jobs on more places. First, check SQL agent Jobs on SQL Server where is PBIRS DB hosted. Additionally  check Subscription and Schedule table in SQL server DB, or check CacheRefreshPlans on PBIRS api (reports/api/v2.0/) 

[d_gosbell]

The mashup containers are the processes the run the Power Query logic when loading your data models. You cannot turn these off, they are an integral part of the data refresh engine. It sounds like someone has setup a scheduled refresh for a report (or multiple reports) to run every half hour.

The most likely scenario is that you have too many reports refreshing at the same time. If this is the case moving the refresh schedules of some of the reports to different times or reduce their frequency.

[Phobos1]

Why is this flagged as solved? This is not the cause, there are no scheduled reports at this particular time. First thing I checked was the report schedules of course as that is the most obvious. Second thing was to disable all background refreshes. Both had no effect at all, there is some other process that is running in PowerBI. For lack of a scheduler or a management tool for this thing it is all guesswork. Maybe someone at MS who built this engine can pitch in?

[d_gosbell]

Looks like one of the Microsoft contract moderators marked my previous post as a solution, not sure why as they have not participated in this thread. I've unmarked it as the solution.

But the mashup engine is only used to get data for a tabular model. And if it is firing off every half hour it almost has to be a scheduled refresh of some sort. Do you have the My Reports feature enabled on your server? If so it is possible that a user has one or more reports in their "My Reports" folder that they have configured for scheduled refreshes. 

If you have reports in direct query mode they would also trigger mashup engine processes, but typically they would not be so regular and ideally they should not use massive amounts of resources.

If you want input from the Microsoft engineering team I would suggest raising an official support ticket. That is the fastest and most effective way of engaging with the product team.

[Phobos1]

Ok thanks they must be paid by solved issues then ;-).  MyReports is not enabled, I do have a bi-hourly update scheduled but that starts ten minutes later than this process, don't know if that can be correlated. I have opened, rescheduled and re-uploaded every report there is with no change in the freezeup. They all use data import. Don't know what else can be changed, or throttle the update process somehow.

[wobi]

Also the meshup container - if stuck - keeps open the connection to our oracle database - and has to be killed... to close the connection @Oracle  - so are there any options in the mashup container to have better control over it's behavior ?

- Wobi