How to Turn OFF Efficiency Mode

[Shelley]

Hello Team, Thanks in advance for anyone who can help. Recent updates sent to my machine have made working in Power BI PAINFULLY SLOW. With this poor performance, I went into task manager, and now see this efficiency mode. I see another post from about a year ago with the same complaints, but no resolution. Does anyone know how to resolve this?

This makes me HATE Power BI. Every single column or measure I create, takes so long to run. I had to shut down my machine yesterday because I had waited 15 minutes, and then I lost a couple hours work because I opened the recovered file this morning, and then it closed itself and I lost it.

[AlexTheGreat]

Hi Shelley,

Power BI doesn’t offer a quick fix for this, but you can navigate (on your task manager) to one of your Webview2 ms-pbi... instances and select "Go to details."

On the new screen, reselect the instance and adjust the priority to Realtime. (You might need to do it a couple times)

Hope it helps!

[Shelley]

Hi Alex, Thanks. I should've mentioned I found that guidance, but it's painful too. There are between six and eight items under Power BI running in efficiency mode. So, it's time consuming to do this for each one, every time I use Power BI, which is every day. Super annoying too because when I go into the details priority for every single one is set to LOW. If we're working in Power BI, priority is not LOW. Thanks, again. Still looking for a more robust solution.

[Anonymous]

Thank you AlexTheGreat

Hi, @Shelley 

Task Manager Efficiency Mode is a new feature that gives you options to ensure that certain running processes don't put a strain on your CPU, resulting in faster foreground response and better energy efficiency. It can also help you identify applications that are already running in Efficiency mode and are good citizens of the OS.

Reduce Process Interference with Task Manager Efficiency Mode - Performance and Diagnostics

You can refer to the following discussion and solution:

How to permanently disable Windows 11 "efficiency mode"? - Microsoft Community

Efficiency Mode is greyed out(Windows 11) - Microsoft Community

What is Efficiency Mode in Task Manager on Windows 11 and How to Use It

Turn On or Off Efficiency Mode for App or Process in Windows 11 Tutorial | Windows 11 Forum

Power BI desktop does not automatically start Efficiency Mode:

In My pc:

If you still have problems, we recommend consulting the Windows team.

Best Regards

Jianpeng Li

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[Shelley]

Thank you for the additional information as it's helpful. However, I haven't been able to find in those links how to disable it for Power BI. It is grayed out in the header of my Task Manager, and to go one by one in each process and turn it off, it is only temporary. It seems like the Power BI team should be concerned about this. I'm not the only one who's encountering this problem. You mentioned the Windows Team. Is it possible for you to point me to that team? For example, how do I specifically contact them? When I found the community on the web and click to go to it, it's really slow - probably because Edge is in efficiency mode - and then I receive this error:

An error occurred while processing your request.

Reference #97.b172117.1730737657.2e63e272

https://errors.edgesuite.net/97.b172117.1730737657.2e63e272

[Anonymous]

Hi, @Shelley 

Thank you for your reply. We are paying attention to this issue. Since the allocation of processes and the decision on how to schedule them, whether to use Efficiency Mode is managed by Windows design, I tried to learn a lot of feedback about this mode from the Internet. Many users encountered the same problem as you in other applications: Efficiency Mode was automatically enabled, causing the application to run slowly.

Your button being grayed out is consistent with this issue:

Efficiency Mode is greyed out(Windows 11) - Microsoft Community

You can try the solution of the user below. For the specific method, click the link below and raise a new question in the Windows forum to let Windows professionals guide you on how to achieve your goal.

Create a new question or start a discussion

Best Regards

Jianpeng Li

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[Shelley]

Thank you @Anonymous Jianpeng as this gave me something to try, but I could not modify the shortcut in Windows 11 to turn off Efficiency Mode as the poster had suggested.

My best luck to this point has been thanks to one of my teammates who suggested downloading Power BI from the Power BI site NOT the Microsoft Store. From the site, Power BI does not perform the same "auto" efficiency mode in Windows, and so my performance has improved; HOWEVER, it is still very slow in refreshes as well as any steps in the query editor. I looked in the Task Manager, and it appears that Webview 2, which Power BI is using is going into Efficiency Mode just like Power BI Desktop was, and again, I cannot disable it. This is so frustrating.

I posted inside our company team and several others are pinging me about their complete frustration with how slow Power BI is for them too. Please, please bring this to the attention of your Power BI people so they can have some impact and/or influence with the Windows team as this is really giving Power BI a bad reputation. 

[Anonymous]

Hi, @Shelley 

I understand your feelings and experiences very well, and the experience brought to us by the software lag will be very bad.
I'd love to help you with the issue, have you tried adjusting the allocable RAM for Power BI? As shown in the figure below:

A computer with 64G memory is generally enough if the amount of data is not large.If you feel that PBI runs slowly after creating measure or column, it may be that your formula has used too many iterations or repeated calculations.

As my computer showed, there is no way to control whether a piece of software goes into Efficiency Mode or not. This mode is determined by the Task manager software and whether to enter this mode. Other software is also usually subject to this rule:

When I reopen it, Task Manager re-judges whether to enter that mode or not:

I can't directly modify or disable the Task manager schema for you, it's beyond the scope of Power BI, which is essentially a piece of software that runs on win, and is subject to the same control as the Task manager.

For other performance optimizations or lag in Power BI itself, you can refer to the following articles:

You can use DAX studio or PBI preformance analyzer to monitor duration.

Here are some links about DAX optimization.

Evaluation configuration settings for Desktop - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

https://maqsoftware.com/expertise/powerbi/dax-best-practices

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/create-reports/desktop-performance-analyzer

If it doesn’t solve your problem, please feel free to ask me.

Best Regards

Jianpeng Li

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[Shelley]

Hi Again, Jianpeng, As for the allocable RAM, do you have a suggestion as to what to change it to? My machine is currently at default 4096. I will try bumping it up, but if you have any suggestions, I'm interested in hearing them.

Based on my seven-plus years of experience with Power BI and several years with Qlik, his is one of my smaller models and the processes I'm running are pretty simple, so it shouldn't be this slow.

Thanks again for your help.