topic Re: Excessive CU usage in Fabric IQ in IQ

Excessive CU usage in Fabric IQ

joaomacp — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 16:53:49 GMT

I’m running a tiny PoC with Fabric IQ and hitting a bottleneck with capacity consumption.

The setup is super simple:

Capacity: F4

Data: 2 tables from Lakehouse. A "Sale" fact table with 2k rows and a "Salesperson" dimension with 25 records.

Ontology: 2 nodes (Sale and Salesperson) and 1 property.

Data agent: connected exclusively to the ontology.

I asked the Data Agent exactly 10 questions, and my capacity went straight into background throttling. Looking at the metrics, 90% of the CUs were swallowed by GraphIndex (Graph General Operations).

Is it normal for such a small dataset to trigger this much usage? Has anyone else seen this or found a way to optimize it?

Attached the screenshot of the spike.

Before:

After 10 prompts:

Any tips?

Re: Excessive CU usage in Fabric IQ

arabalca — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 13:40:49 GMT

Hi joaomacp ,

The same thing has happened to me. We are currently testing and, while I understand that optimizations will improve over time, I think it is important to acknowledge something: AI workloads like this are not designed to run efficiently on small capacities such as F2 or F4.

In my opinion, Fabric IQ brings a lot of value and is something that you almost need to have in your roadmap. However, we also need to be aware that this value comes with a cost. This is where a key aspect comes into play: DataOps.

We are moving into more complex scenarios (real-time, agents, graphs, etc.), and this means it is no longer just about building solutions. We need to start thinking seriously about:

The ROI of each use case
How to optimize capacity consumption
Which workloads truly justify this level of investment

As an additional recommendation, I believe it will be key to:

Properly separate environments (dev/test/prod) to avoid unnecessary capacity consumption
Monitor usage from the beginning
Prioritize use cases with real business impact

Thanks for sharing your experience. If you notice any updates or improvements, it would be great if you could share them

Re: Excessive CU usage in Fabric IQ

joaomacp — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 16:53:33 GMT

Hi arabalca , thanks for the reply! I'll definitely keep the tests running and share my future findings.

Re: Excessive CU usage in Fabric IQ

arabalca — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 22:34:32 GMT

Perfect joaomacp ,if you find the answer helpful, you can consider it resolved

I remain at your disposal for any further questions.

Best regards,

Re: Excessive CU usage in Fabric IQ

arabalca — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 18:45:16 GMT

Hi joaomacp
if this helped you, I’d appreciate it if you could mark it as the accepted solution and give it a like 👍
This helps others in the community find the answer more easily.
Thanks! 🙌

Re: Excessive CU usage in Fabric IQ

joaomacp — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 19:17:49 GMT

Done!