Power BI report slow to refresh but now fast

[dreww12345]

Hi there,

Back around May, I ran into an issue with some of my Power BI reports. 

The reports were taking far too long to refresh. A report that took only 1 hr 20 min to refresh before May started to consistently take 3-4 hrs to reload. In some instances, it even took up to 7 hrs. Since reports will timeout and throw an error if they take longer than 2 hrs to refresh we could no longer have these reports automatically refresh at the Power BI service level. I had to manually refresh the reports locally for months.

Just a couple of days ago these same reports started refreshing quickly again (<2 hr refresh time). I am v. happy that the reports are now refreshing quickly but it is a mystery to me why they a) started taking so long to refresh in May and b) why they are now suddenly refreshing in about 1/3 of the time that they took in June.

We use ODate Nav web services to get our data. The reports are big but they definitely should not take 3-4 hrs to refresh.

I have been in contact with Power BI support and they have stated that everything looks fine with our report.

I have also contacted my organization's IT company and they have said that the server load has been normal and stable over the past months. No one within my organization is aware of any changes to servers in the past few months.

This could be a stupid thought but is it possible that something on Power BI's end was the cause of the slow refresh issue?

Any insights would be greatly appreciated. I want to determine why the reports are now refreshing quickly but I'm not sure where to begin looking

Thanks!

[v-deddai1-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @dreww12345 ,

You mentioned that refresh duration of 2 hours will be timeout.I think you're using shared capacity. With shared capacity, your memory and CPU resources are shared with others. If you want to alleviate this situation, you will need to upgrade to the Premiumn.

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

Best Regards,

Dedmon Dai

[dreww12345]

Interesting. Yes, it appears that we do not have PBI Premium. What you are saying makes sense. Thanks

[lbendlin]

What's your SKU?  If you don't have Premium then you are sharing capacity with other companies. You have no control over their usage of the platform. Like co-located databases on a SQL server. One bad apple can bring the entire server to its knees.