General Question

[Anonymous]

How would one go about discovering why a dashboard may be running slugglishly? I'm sure some kind of DAX somewhere I've built is the cause but I'm just not sure how to pinpoint where with so many formulas. Examples of it running it slow are:

• The "Working On It" box lingering for up to 30 seconds when I need to make a new measure/column on any table. Even deleting a measure/column gives the same effect.
• When trying to establish relationships between tables, the line that connects the two tables will take 15-30 seconds to appear before I can toggle with its settings.
• PBI file taking 40 seconds to a minute to open.
• If I need to format a measure/column using the Modeling tab, it takes up to 20-30 seconds before the change kicks in. (Formatting from general to % or $ or something of that nature)

This has only recently started happning so I have a slight idea of the tables/formulas it could be coming from but I still wouldn't know how to pinpoint where exactly or how to fix. Or if this is normal behavior on dashboards with a lot of data/calculating going on.

[jcarville]

@Anonymous, have a look at this webinar by @marcorusso: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/6-18-webinar-my-power-bi-report-is-slow-what-should-i-do-by-marco-russo/

I had similar issues to yourself and was able to improve the query speed of some of my measures by 40% after following the techniques he talks about in the webinar.

[Anonymous]

@jcarville thanks, I'll check this out!

[Anonymous]

Hey @Anonymous

I experienced the exact same symptoms last week. The file was small with not much data. The only thing that I believe made mine sluggish was one of my measures. It needed to take the maximum cumulative sum up to that date. It doesn't sound that difficult but if you think about it, it requires a cumulative sum calculation for each date up to the date of the current filter context, and then a MAXX to loop through all of those cumulative sums to get the max. After implementing that measure, whenever I tried to create a new measure or close the Query Editor, it would spin on the Working on it screen for a long time. Even when the measure wasn't calculating I had the issue.

By chance, do you have a very large measure that calculates for more than a minute?

[Anonymous]

@Anonymous Luckily I don't have anything that's taking up to a minute to run. I previously was using the AVERAGEX function. and things were taking up to 2 minutes almost to react to anything. Had to CTRL+ALT+DELETE a lot of the time and reopen the whole PBI file. Found a different way to get the same answers and luckily it runs quicker now and doesn't freeze, but I just wasn't sure if this was normal or not. I think the measures I have built do run through entire tables to get the answers needed so maybe that's why...