Starting Session takes really slow - notebook session Microsoft Fabric

[naanii]

Hi Community,

I have a question regarding starting sessions (New standard session and New high concurrency session) for running notebooks in Microsoft Fabric. We are running an F64 trial license (Runtime versionRuntime 1.2 (Spark 3.4, Delta 2.4)).

When I start a session, it takes 3 minutes.
When my colleague starts a session, it takes 3 seconds.

What is the cause of this difference? And what changes do I have to make to get a 3 second boot time?

Please let me know if anyone can help me.

[Richard_100]

We have this as well.  Default envirnoment is very quick, but custom environments are very slow.  It's quicker to %pip install all your stuff in the notebook rather than have it available to import from the envirnoment, which seems pretty mad to me.

Example:

Notebook with %pip install geopandas shapely pyproj fiona contextily, 11 seconds to start session and 28 seconds to run this first big import cell (installing and then importing all my libraries).

Notebook with in envirnoment with geopandas, shapely, pyproj, fiona and contextily installed there, and then import cell having the %pip part removed: 2 minutes to start session and then a further 20 seconds ish to run the cell. 

[tida]

Hi all,

Since a couple of days it takes about 3min to start a session, where it previously was about 3sec!

I already switched to runtime 1.3 but the issue remains.

Location northern europe, trial version

[theross]

Spoke to one of the fantastic support people - sounds like it's unavoidable at the moment. Default environments are "ready to go", as soon as you create your own it takes time to spin them up.

Someone else has already submitted a request to improve this... hop on over and upvote if it'll help you: Microsoft Idea

[theross]

Was any solution/advice for this issue offered?

I'm seeing the exact same thing. A simple "Hello World" notebook using the default workspace environment will start a spark session in approx 4-5 seconds. Creating a new environment to add a custom library and setting it as the workspace default results in the same "Hello World" notebook now taking just over a minute to start a spark session.

This doesn't appear to be "Network latency, Regional Differences, browser issues, or temporary Fabric service hiccups..." as the difference in startup time can be reproduced with 100% reliability simply by switching the environment back and forth and re-running the same test notebook.

[theross]

Raised support ticket: 2407030050003086

Will add to this thread once there's a response.

[naanii]

Hello,

I removed all the resources/items from My Workspace.

After creating a new notebook, I was able to start a session in about 5 sec.

Then I added a new Environment without any Libraries and this results in 3 minutes of starting time.

Why is this happing? We would like to import Libraries, but I think it is faster to import those in each of our notebooks instead of import those into a Environment.

Any ideas?

[Anonymous]

Hi @naanii ,

Apologize for the issue you are facing. The best course of action is to open a support ticket and have our support team take a closer look at it.

Please reach out to our support team so they can do a more thorough investigation on why this it is happening: Link 

After creating a Support ticket please provide the ticket number as it would help us to track for more information.

Hope this helps. Please let us know if you have any other queries.

[naanii]

Hi,

Thanks for your reply.

Ticket number: 2406180050000408

[jwinchell40]

@naanii - One thing I've noticed is that when using the default Workspace settings for Notebooks it always starts up lightning fast.  When I created a new default "Environment" to preinstall some libraries then it took longer to start-up the cluster.  < 30s  vs 2-3m.  Not sure if that is relevant to your situation or not.

[O_Tarek]

can confirm this is exactly what is happening to me as well

[Anonymous]

Hi @naanii ,

We haven’t heard from you on the last response and was just checking back to see if you have a resolution yet.
Otherwise, will respond back with the more details and we will try to help .

[Anonymous]

Hi @naanii ,

We haven’t heard from you on the last response and was just checking back to see if you have a resolution yet.
Otherwise, will respond back with the more details and we will try to help .

[Anonymous]

Hi @naanii , @egons11 ,

Thanks for using Fabric Community.
When I tried to check this issue, my session started in 5 sec.

Are you people still facing this issue?
Few factors can be - Network latency, Regional Differences, browser issues, or temporary Fabric service hiccups could also contribute to the delay.

Hope this is helpful. Please do let me know incase of further queries.

[egons11]

Now, it's actually better.

[egons11]

I have also been facing a similair issue recently, with slow spark cluster session starts, even though we are still running on F64 trial.