Publishing PBIX to Service Takes Hours

[therealomacoder]

My model is fairly small (IMO). About 30 tables, with a mix of direct connect and import storage mode.

The PBIX has zero reports, just the model (besides the blank initial report included in a PBIX file).

I used to be able to publish this thing to PowerBI Service through the 'Publish' button in desktop and it would publish very very quickly, within a minute or so.

Now, starting maybe a couple months ago, it is taking HOURS to publish. I haven't been working with this model too much in the past couple of months but only a couple changes and that's when I noticed the difference. Now, I am back in and working with this model again with lots of changes needing to be made, but I can no longer handle the hours and hours it takes to publish this file.

The PBIX file size is 181MB.

I opened a support incident because after searching on the community I found no relevant solutions. The support person connected to my machine and verified the gateway is running the latest version as well as desktop.

They then wanted me to reproduce the issue for them, so I went ahead and initiated a publish from desktop. After them sitting and watching for 20 minutes, they decided they weren't going to continue to wait. So They asked me to reach back out to them and let them know how long it took. If they don't have the patience (more than 20 minutes) to sit there and watch my screen until it finishes publishing, how do they expect me to have that much patience? I basically went to bed and woke up the next morning to seeing it finally published. I have no clue how many actual minutes it is taking, but it ranges from 1 hour up to 8 hours.

Also, if I try to upload the file directly into the service using the New \ Upload a File, and choosing my local PBIX file, the same issue occurs.

Gurus, help!

[omacoder]

@GilbertQ I would mark your response as the solution but this forum board is not giving me the option to mark any response as a solution. 

[GilbertQ]

No worries, I will accept the solution on your behalf.

Thanks for letting us know.

[Greg_Deckler]

@therealomacoder - You are on the right path getting support involved. I doubt there is anything that the community can do for you other than empathize as we cannot make the Service act better. It is very possible that some change was made to the Service that has broken something with respect to publishing your model but it is hard to say.

Only thing that I can think of to help would be to have someone else try to publish your PBIX to a different tenant and see if it is the same story. Not sure how else to troubleshoot it other than if perhaps you have an old version of it from let's say 2 months ago and you could try publishing that and see if it still takes just as long. Could help prove or disprove if it was some change you made to the data model or something that changed with the Service.

[GilbertQ · Accepted solution]

Hi there

Further to what Greg said, I would see what happens if you had to upload the PBIX from another PC within your organization?

Or what if you had to upload the PBIX from OUTSIDE your organization?

It could potentially be a network issue, or sometimes an anti-virus issue?

[therealomacoder]

Interesting thought @GilbertQ . I did a speed test and my upload is only 2.72mbps (I work from home, so no other office PC to test from really).

I'll test while plugged directly into my router! Thanks!!

[GilbertQ]

Hi there

Yeah that would roughly work out to about 12 minutes if that is your consistent upload speed!

[omacoder]

I found that only 1 of my two DSL lines were online. I imagine the point that things started to slow down with uploading the model is when my 2nd DSL line went down, but I didn't realize it. CenturyLink came to my home and fixed my second line and publishing the model is now working very fast again. Thanks for your help in identifying the root cause.