Download in background disabled, but it does it anyway - why?

[Anonymous]

I have a model that combines CSVs from a couple of SharePoint folders, grabs data from about ten SharePoint Lists and pulls a half a dozen excel files.  The data only needs to be refreshed once a month but I am constantly working on measures and visualizations.

I have disabled background data refresh, but very often when I open the .pbix my system slows to a crawl because Power Query has decided to refresh itself (I open the query editor and see several queries with the yellow caution next to them).  There are three Mashup processes churning away.  I have 6 cores, 24 gig of memory and allow 8 gig of cache to this model.  It takes 30 minutes or more and it consumes so many resources that skype becomes unusable.  As soon as the refreshes complete, all is back to normal.  I let it complete last night and then saved the file hoping it would quiet down for a while, but it did it again as soon as I opened it this morning.

Any idea why this is happening and how to stop that it so that it only resheshes when I ask it to?

[Anonymous]

I eventually worked around this issue by changing the logic in some of my queries.  I had been doing a Table.Buffer on a couple of tables that had grown pretty large.  Oddly, there was not a gradual degredation in performance as these tables grew over time, but rather I seemed to hit a wall.  Once I coded around the need for the Table.Buffer, the issue disappeared.  Still odd to me that this happened and the cache was not depleated.

[v-easonf-msft]

Hi , @Anonymous 

Make sure you have enough data cache space in your settings

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.

[Anonymous]

@v-easonf-msft, thanks, but I suspect that is not it.  I have 8Gb allocated and it is using just over 1Gb.

Any other ideas?

1 Gb cache used of 8Gb

[v-easonf-msft]

Hi , @Anonymous 

Take a try to  disable this:

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.

[Anonymous]

Thanks @v-easonf-msft, but I do use that feature for data sources that almost NEVER change, but I need it enabled for those that as necessary for my monthly updates.

Are there any suggestions on how to troubleshoot this?  It has become a serious problem for me.

[v-easonf-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi , @Anonymous 

For the issue,I have not come up with other workarounds.

It is suggest to raise it to the support team for better advice,please kindly open a ticket here if you are a pro user: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/support/

Best Regards,
Community Support Team _ Eason