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LouStagner's avatar
LouStagner
Frequent Visitor
8 years ago

Performance Questions - 2 of them

Howdy!

 

I use PowerBI desktop often for data shaping (for machine learning projects).  My data science friends are always blown away at what Power BI can easily do.

 

2 questions around performance:

 

Question 1:

I am getting a new personal desktop.  My old one has an Intel i5 6400 quad core 2.70GHz with 8GB RAM.  My new desktop has an Intel i5 8600k with 6 cores 3.6GHz with 64GB RAM.

 

Will I notice much of a performance improvement for "resource intensive" tasks with the new desktop?   ...  or was the old desktop sufficient enough and the new desktop won't make much performance difference?

 

Question 2:

I have some data manipulation work I am doing. There are 2 tables in the mix. The primary data table has ~200 columns and 9,000 rows. You can think of the second table as a "custom calendar" type of deal. That table is there for moving average usage.  This is the "lookup" table I reference when implementing Rob Collie's "Greatest Formula In The World" approach for moving averages and moving sums. The secondary table also has 9,000 rows.  All those rows are needed and I am not able to skinny that "custom calendar" table down.  

I did a bunch of prep work to shape the data. Then I had created 195 measures using Collie's "Greatest" formual to get rolling values. I added all 195 measures to a table visualization on a Power BI tab. I added a single filter so I can run my output in "chunks".  For 1/3rd of the data, it takes 60 minutes for the table visualization to populate and then another 15 minutes for me to export the output to a csv file. I need to do this 3 times to get all of my data exported. 

I have read that the Filter function can really impact performance (I *think* it's because it limits what can be processed in parallel). 

Are there any recommendations on how I might approach this differently to speed up performance? As an FYI, this is not a user-facing tool. It is NOT for users. This is me using PowerBI to quickly do some kick-butt data manipulation that in other tools would be crazy difficult to pull off. 

 

Thanks!

 

 

 

2 Replies

  • LouStagner's avatar
    LouStagner
    Frequent Visitor

    Any ideas on this?  I am stumped on ideal approach regarding question 2...

    • v-juanli-msft's avatar
      v-juanli-msft
      Icon for Community Support rankCommunity Support

      Hi
      Sorry for being late since I had a vocation past few days.

       

      Question1: this article introduces the minimum requirements to run Power BI Desktop, a high-level hardware will improve performance to a certain extent, but not a lot.

       

      Question2: since there are big datasets and lots of measures, it leads to a slow performance on reports.
      I search for some tips to improve performance.
      power-bi-reports-performance

      slicers-performance

      an article regarding fully aspects of Power BI performance.

      Best Regards
      Maggie