Why is Power BI service so slow vs Desktop

Power BI Online Service
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Hi All,

I have done a LOT of work on my work dashboard and finally at the stage where I can publish it to the service for mgt review. I am finding :

  • the report is rendering very slow in the service compared to desktop.
  • In my desktop report, all images render in 5 seconds or so and my tooltips are instant.
  • the service rendering takes forever :frowning: it just took my manager 3min for his images to render :tired_face:
  • the service loads the tooltips very slow, around 10seconds

I cannot share the model due to confidentiality however wondering if anyone has any suggestions on how to speed up the service? :pray:

I should add that we do have good internet connection

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Hi Kim,

sorry to hear you’re having trouble with your report not being very speedy in the service.

It’s a bit difficult to diagnose without seeing the model/measures etc and totally understand you cannot publish due to confidentiality.

Are you using a lot of DAX iterators?
Lots of calculated columns?
What are you data sources?

I’d definitely recommend @AntrikshSharma two courses on DAX Studio and Optimisation, links below, for helping you understand where you have issues in your report.

Enterprise DNA

Enterprise DNA

Also a great book, link below, on optimizing Power BI Reports

Microsoft Power BI Performance Best Practices: A comprehensive guide to building consistently fast Power BI solutions: Amazon.co.uk: Merchant, Bhavik, Webb, Christopher: 9781801076449: Books

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@DavieJoe what I find confusing is that I am happy with the performance in desktop. Why would service performance be so poor?
I am not using many iterators. Mainly calculate and simple dax however I do have a lot of visuals to render but like I said, they render fine in desktop

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When you have a PBIX open in Power BI Desktop, the data set is already loaded into memory. I’m pretty sure that the Power BI Service does not keep all datasets in memory all the time.

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@KimC honestly as crazy as it sounds, I’ve had this happen to me a few times. I even had the service say it was unable to load.

I did the famous IT solution which was turn my computer off. Then turn on. I have a habit of leaving my system in sleep mode overnight. Lazy on my part but I have a lot of windows opened.

That’s the other problem. If you have a lot of applications in windows running it bogs down the Cache and CPU performance.

Best of luck.

1 Like
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@DavieJoe & @Paul.Gerber thank you for your feedback. I needed to fix my problem quickly, so I changed my one page into 3 pages and it solved the problem and looks much better.

AntrikshSharma courses are on my to do list but I need some time to slowly work through it. Thanks for your responses :slight_smile:

2 Likes
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Glad to hear you’ve come up with a fix that makes things speedier!

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@KimC that is good news. Glad it was figured out.