Does number of active users affect performance?

[jickes]

I am having a huge performance issue with my dataset and related reports I've built in the PowerBI service. I've been working on this dataset and reports for a few months and finally was launching it today to my team. Up until today I was the only user, and working with the dataset and reports was instant; but today, inconsistenly, things would work great, or completely not work at all for everyone. It seemed to only have an issue when multiple users were trying to access the reports, so I'm wondering, is that the case? Does the number of users interacting with visuals in reports cause a slow down? Or am I on the wrong path and should be looking elsewhere for the issue?

[jickes]

Ok, it's not just my dataset, everything on PowerBI service is just spinning for me. When I try to go to my workspace it sits and spins, same with most of the other pages. 

[Anonymous]

@jickes, 

Did you ever get this answered by the Microsoft team? We're starting to rollout a couple of dashboards to a group (just less than 20 users) and there was some experiencing the latency issues you described with the spinning wheel (yesterday, 02/07/2017 around 8AM CT). I would have anticipated that the number of concurrent users would have been higher. The particular dashboards all were using data imports and there wasn't any data updates going on at that time to cause any delay.

Any info would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Jonathan 

[jickes]

My issues ended up not being dataset related, but were instead due to performance issues on Microsoft's end. They identified the server for my region that handled imported data sets was having issues. It has since been resolved and I don't experience the problem anymore. 

http://community.powerbi.com/t5/Service/Lag-slow-load-just-spinning/td-p/62770/page/3

[ankitpatira]

@jickes In that case I would contact MS support as I cannot reproduce your issue. Also checking this page there are no known issues with power bi service currently.

[ankitpatira]

@jickes Depends on which mechanism you've used. If report is built using Import then all data is cached in power bi service and I wouldm't expect any performance issues. If report is using DirectQuery to on-prem data source and large number of users are accessing that report then I would expect some performance issues since each time user interact with visual on report query is sent on-premise to data source.

[jickes]

@ankitpatira That is what I expected as well. I used the import function, built the dataset in PowerBI desktop and published to the service. We had 10 users trying to look at reports but only got spinning wheels and eventually 'Failed to refresh visual' messages. Then, around 30 mintues later I checked and everyting performed normally. So we tried again later in the day to all look at it together, and same thing, spinning wheels.