Sloowwwww Reports

[omacoder]

Just recently, maybe around Dec 12th timeframe, the reports in PowerBI service have been taking an exceptional amount of time to load.

Before: a report and all widgets would load in 2 seconds.

Now: a report isn't finishing loading until about 31 seconds.

We're connected to SQL Server live premise data source via the gateway.

There's no CPU contention on the server.

First thing I tried was upgrading to the latest version of the gateway.

(Note, even after upgrading to the latest version of the gateway, Manage Gateways in PowerBI Service still shows a message that the gateways are out of date... very odd).

We are not using PowerBI Premium.

All reports were built in PowerBI Service, on top of a model published from PowerBI Desktop.

Therefore I can't really refresh the report in PowerBI Desktop to compare performance times, as there's no PBIX of the report to open via Desktop.

Ideas on where to start troubleshooting?

[v-easonf-msft]

Hi , @omacoder 

Reports can load slowly for a number of reasons. Such as inefficient report designs，insufficient capacity resources，high concurrent report usage etc.

If  all reports in the same area load slowly ,it is likely that the  PowerBi service was degraded(This should be an intermittent problem).

If individual reports load slowly, please consider whether  dataset or the report model  need to be optimized.

In addition , I recommend browsing the following article for more details about why reports load slowly .

url :https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-premium-capacity-optimize#best-practices

Best Regards,
Community Support Team _ Eason
If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[omacoder · Accepted solution]

Hello @v-easonf-msft thank you for your input. I have resolved this.

The issue is that a database moved servers and I was not notified to update the connection in the model, nor update the gateway.

Once this connection was fixed, the performance of the reports returned to normal.

I cannot believe that having a bad connection inside of the model slowed the performance down this badly!!! Seems like this would be considered a defect, not as designed.