How to get faster CPU?

[PowerWhy]

Hello,

I have a report that is slow to refresh visualisations when slicers are changed by a user. It is slow on both desktop and when I upload to service (we have a premium workspace). Please could you tell me how / if it's possible to increase the amount of CPU being used when this one report is being used? I'm sure we're well below capacity for a premium account so it seems reasonable to me to through a massive amount of CPU as this one visualisation to get it down from 50 seconds to about 2 seconds refresh time.

(I think we may have generation 2 premium available, if that makes a difference?)

Many thanks for your help,

CW

[v-easonf-msft]

Hi, @PowerWhy 

There are many reasons that can contribute to a slow report. 

• Insufficient capacity resources
• Inefficient report designs 
• Dataset slow, especially when reports have previously performed well 
• High concurrent report usage 

You can use the Power BI Premium Capacity Metrics app to monitor some key metrics of capacity, then identify possible problems and handle them.

Please refer to below tutorials for more details .

Optimizing Premium capacities 

Power BI Premium Generation 2 

Best Regards,
Community Support Team _ Eason

[AlexisOlson · Accepted solution]

@Burningsuit is correct that it's critical to understand why your report is slow. Power BI can handle billions of rows in many situations if the data model and measures are built properly. Without seeing your model, it's not feasible to diagnose the specifics of your situation.

That said, I'd guess that you have DAX measures that aren't optimized. In this situation, the limiting factor is often the formula engine, which is single-threaded. If your bottleneck is indeed the formula engine, then it doesn't help to add more CPUs since the work cannot be distributed efficiently. A faster CPU would help, but that won't reduce the refresh time by multiple orders of magnitude like you want.

In summary, hardware is usually one of the last things to consider when looking to improve Power BI performance.

[Burningsuit]

Hi @PowerWhy 

The first question I like to ask in these scenario's is "why is it slow?". Refreshing vizuals when a slicer changes should be pretty quick, unless you report falls into one of three main categories.

1) You're using a direct connection to your data (an SQL or other data engine), not Import mode.

2) You have millions of records

3) You have a horribly complex (or broken) Data Model.

I have a guess you may be using direct connect, not import mode. In which case adding CPU to Power BI is not going to help. But please tell us more about your Report and we may be able to diagnose what is going on.

Hope this helps

Stuart