Data Refresh Timeout Limit for P1, P2 and P3? Timeout Issue

[Anonymous]

Hi All,

We are using Power BI P1 premium subscription and the data source is Oracle Public Cloud. Every time I run the refresh (on demand/schedule) I am getting timeout error as shown. This is only happening when I am refreshing a big dataset i.e. Fact table having around 93Mn rows. I need some clarifications and help on:

1. What is the timeout limit for P1 subscription defined by Microsoft? Can we increase it? In our case timeout is happening after 4 hours and some time after 2 hours only?

2. Is this timeout happening due to the above limit only? Power BI Desktop refresh is happening fine in 2 hours 10 min, then on services it should take same time right?

3. If this timeout is happening due to movement of data from OPC to Power BI due to network or something. How can we handle that any idea? 

Error:

[Anonymous]

There is no publicly known timeout limit for the data refresh. But we were told via a premium support case that the effective time out is 2 hours via the on-premise gateway. This may be different for cloud connections. This a bit grey area, Microsoft is not doing the utmost effort to publicize the behind the scene limits. For most people they are irrelevent anyway.

On the other hand we were told that there is a bug around the timeouts, which they are actively working on. We were let known that a fix is anticipated by the beginning of next week (18th June). Certainly exact date cannot be told as they don't patch all their tenants at the same time.

Regarding expected refresh time vs. Desktop. That depends on the network you have. If your PBI Desktop runs in the cloud next to the OPC source, then it is fair to assume that it will be faster than PBI Service from Azure.

Please note that the performance of the data refresh in PBI Service depends on the workload that your premium capacity is undertaking. If it is heavily loaded when the data refresh occurs, then it may be waiting in the queue, then the processing capacity to handle it once it began may be hampered by higher priority tasks, such as people opening reports.

So sadly there is no exact number for the expected performance or limit. If you would like to get to the very limit of the system, then the best that you can do is to have a dedicated premium capacity for your scenario, and do a test run there. Have nothing else doing anything in the capacity, and run a data refresh. Then you will see the true performance peak, which you could expect as the best case scenario.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the reply.

What is the timeout limit in on-premises data gateway (Enterprise) if P1 premium capacity is present? I guess it is 4 hours as per Microsoft. Not sure.

It seems all refreshes which takes less than 2 hours are completing fine but beyond 2hours is timing out.

In your case, when did you face this issue?

[Anonymous]

The type of the capacity is irrelevant. The timeout settings are the same for P1, P2, P3. As you observed, it is effectively 2 hours. However it should be 5 hours according to the MS support. The bug fix is underway according to them.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Hi,

I found a workaround for this. Switching network connectivity from direct TCP to HTTPS results into data refresh not getting timeout after 2 hours. Now the refresh is running fine after 2 hours also and it is getting completed in 2 hours 30 min. Network protocol can be swicthed from dircet TCP to HTTPS from data gateway app UI or from config file.