Power BI Desktop WebView2 Out Of Memory

[rahulshevde]

Power BI is experiencing a problem with WebView2 running Out of memory. We have identified some of the top causes of this and have the details below. If that does not address your Out of memory problem, contact us at  pbidesktopwebview2issues@service.microsoft.com

Out of Memory cause: 

Custom visuals causing memory leak - If you are using any custom visuals and are running into Out of Memory crahses, please try removing the custom visuals to check if it resolves the issue. If it does, please reach out with the visual which was cauing the memory leak so we can address it. 

If you are not using any custom visuals and are still running into this, it could be due to having a lot of report pages and visuals per page. This causes the browser heap memory to exceed the 4GB limit and crash. This is sadly a limitation of chromium. 

Possible workaround 

• Limit the number of visuals in the report. The recommendation is to split the report into smaller reports and using cross-drillthrough - Use cross-report drillthrough in Power BI Desktop - Power BI | Microsoft Docs.The cross-drillthrough feature carries through filters when using cross drill through.

[glassjaw]

Still experiencing this error. @rahulshevde have you folks been able to get in contact with the WebView2 team and come up with a gameplan? This bug is very inconvenient on hardware with >50GB free RAM and forces me to limit my reports to use less than 5GB of RAM.

[lbendlin]

This is highly annoying.  Just lost five hours of work because 

whatever this is couldn't figure out how to use 64GB of RAM ?

[kirah2128]

I'm also encountering the same issue 😞 its sad that I wasnt able to recover all my changes after 3 hours of work.

[pborah]

I have been having this issue since the January 2024 updates. I'm on March 2024 version now. It's not because my reports are too big or visually rich. Infact my datasets usually contain no more than 50k rows and simple visuals that already come with PowerBI. It is happening even when I have absolutely blank report on standby on my laptop. The issue seems to occur when I've kept a report open for too long, but not always. The last time it happened few minutes ago, my test report was just open for about 5 hours and only had 6 scatterplots across 3 pages and about 5 card visuals. Nothing heavy on graphics, no extra background colors or images, fancy charts, or custom visuals, just those scatterplots depicting about 15k data points each.

[mlane]

@pborah  I wanted to follow up on your message. I am having the same issue with Power BI and several applications

[VincentKok]

Facing the WebView2 Out Of Memory issue now for two days. 

No custom visuals, not a lot of pages. Only happens when I try to change a slicer value. When I drag the new field on top of the old field it crashes, when I remove the old field and then add the new field all is good. 

Frustrating to say the least!

[v-xiaoyan-msft]

Hi all,

We've noticed your problem, most of this issue is related to report design, you can follow the advice given by the OP to troubleshoot; if the problem persists, you need to collect logs for further investigation.

Since community support engineers don't have that access, I would suggest opening a Support Ticket. If you are a Power BI Pro or Fabric licensee, you can create a support ticket for free and a dedicated Microsoft engineer will come to solve the problem for you. 
It would be great if you continue to share in this issue to help others with similar problems after you know the root cause or solution.

The link of Power BI Support: Support | Microsoft Power BI

For how to create a support ticket, please refer to How to create a support ticket in Power BI - Microsoft Power BI Community

Best Regards,
Community Support Team _ Caitlyn

[AJDaniel]

I have been experiencing this webview2 error for a couple of days now. I have a task to submit and the deadline is in 2 days. Kindly help me fix this webview2 memory out of a thing. Thanks 

[glassjaw]

@v-xiaoyan-msft Have y'all investigated pborah's comment that it might be related to the time a report is left open? I tend to leave my reports open to cross reference when analyzing and sharing DAX measures, and only see this on my live connection reports after significant time open.

[pborah]

@rahulshevde @v-xiaoyan-msft these solutions do not look like they will work for me because my webview OOM error are not caused by this. 

We absolutely do not use any custom visuals in our reports/dashboards because Microsoft Appsource is blocked by our firewall and we cannot download custom visuals. Next, most of our reports contains at most 3-4 visuals and 2-3 pages. Are you telling me this is enough to cause OOM issues? We have maybe 3-4 reports out of collection of 150+ that use more than 200k rows of data and have 7-8 pages owith 3-4 visuals per page. But those heavy reports also do not cause OOM issues always.

OOM errors are very random for me and there's no telltale sign of what's causing it. For example - there have been times when I got an OOM error immediately after connecting to a data source and loading, transforming that data, well before dropping even a single visual on the report. Datasets were anywhere between 10k-40k rows and about 20-30 columns. Past versions of Power BI (pre january 2024) have never had any issues handling data of this size. Other times, as I've mentioned before, just leaving a report open for too long causes an OOM error when I try to go back to working on that pbix. Still other times, when I'm not even working on a pbix file, and have it minimized, I randomly get an OOM error (power BI dialog box) when I'm working on a completely different tool such as Spyder, Powershell ISE, SSMS, Excel (!) or Knime. The other thing to note is that for it does not matter whether the reports are data and visual heavy or not. Sometimes I'm able to complete my edits on the same pbix files without any issues, whereas other times, those exact same reports will give me OOM error.

While I understand that this is being caused by memory leak issues, can I ask what is it about the new 2024 versions that causing these memory leak issues so much? I never came across this issue since I started using PowerBI in 2020. I am a little reluctant to reach for premium tech support because from experience I know their most of their solution is simply reading the microsoft documentation and regurgitating it back to me which does not help my case bacause I've already gone over them before reaching out to support. Thank you.

I have 32 gigs of RAM on my laptop.