Power BI Desktop Refresh Slow

[jillian]

I just upgraded to the latest Power BI Desktop Version: 2.32.4307.522 64-bit (February 2016).

Since the upgrade, when i attempt to Refresh the data from SQL Server, the application loads the rows from the table(s) and then just hangs for about 5-10 minutes. (Even for a small data set like 1000 rows.) After some time the application will then complete the refresh.

Anyone know whats going on here?

-jillian

[Anonymous]

I too am having a slow refresh after doing the latest update in Aug - I see no one from Microsoft has responded to this post lately.  Please respond with insight.

Thanks!!

[Anonymous]

I have also same problems, disabled auto detect relationships and auto date/time but no luck. Hangs in Waiting for other quories and Evaluating.

This is very frustrating.

[sdkearns]

I am also experiencing slow refresh times against Oracle data.  I am on version 2.49.4831.521 64-bit (August, 2017)  Please  help.

[pqian]

@jillian can you elaborate what "hangs for 5-10 mins" mean? Is it responsive to mouse input (like dragging), is there a status dialog displaying what it is doing? Can you take a screenshot of the hang?

[jillian]

Power BI Desktop just "hangs" with spinning icons for ~5mins while refreshing. Here is a screenshot showing the load. The mouse and other applications still work fine but the Power BI desktop application is frozen waiting. It's doing this across multiple .pbix files and even on ones with a very small dataset. It started happening after this latest version from yesterday evening.

I've tried re-installing the application and a clean reboot and still seeing this behavior.

-jillian

[pqian]

@jillian are the numbers for any of these queries moving?

If you go to the Task Manager, how many Microsoft.Mashup.Container*.exe can you find there, and are any of them busy?

Have you tried to disable relationship detection in the settings dialog?

[jillian]

The data changes once per hour for this particular dataset. The entire .pbix is only 3.8MB including the data. I'm currently seeing 3x Microsoft.Mashup.Container.NetFX40.exe's running.

I tried disabling both Import / Autodetect Relationships as well as disabling Type Detection. I'm seeing the same slowness on this latest build.

-jillian

[pqian · Accepted solution]

@jillian, one other thing to turn off (just to diagnose) in the settings dialog:

Current File->Data Load->Auto Date/Time

With this off, try refresh again

[jillian]

I disabled Data Load -> Auto Date/Time and voila! That fixed it!

Thank you. Wonder what changed in the latest build that's causing this. I havent ran into this problem before.

[pqian]

@jillian Well that only explains the reason, not the cause. We'll investigate this internally.

I'm guessing your data probably have many columns of date/time type, so behind the scenes we are trying to create a date table automatically, which takes time. Disabling the auto date/time feature means you'll probably need to manually create a date table in the model. There are many ways to do this, and many posts about it on this forum.

Regards,

PQ

[jbee]

Hi there, I've tried all the things mentioned in this post and my refresh still takes around half an hour (used to take around 15 seconds). Running latest version of Power BI Desktop. Any ideas?

[jbee]

I tracked mine down to the refresh from OneDrive for Business - used to work fine when I had not much in OneDrive for Business, but now that I have tens of thousands of files, the refresh takes over half an hour. Query filters to correct folder and filetype.

Worked it out by looking at the refresh size which showed hundreds of MB, but the folder contains no more than 100KB of data.

Can anyone assist with this?

Cheers

[dmoffat]

Me too ... What's up here?

[Anonymous]

I started noticing the slow refresh issue with upgrading to the latest Power BI Desktop version (2.48.4792.721 64-bit (July 2017).