"Working on it" Frustration

[IntaBruce]

Power BI is is frequently getting stuck in a loop of "Working on it", with no way out except closing the app and going through the painful process of recovering the file.  This started yesterday, and has become more frequent, each time I add a column to a table or click on Transform data to go to Power Query.

I have tried a reboot and have even uninstalled and reinstalled Power BI Desktop.

My model is quite big (in my view) with over 120 tables from two sql databases, SharePoint, Excel, and a few hand keyed.  There are several hundred thousand rows in some tables.

Have I overstretched Power BI and need to do some pruning (or tuning)?  I'm no data engineer, just an overenthusiastic citizen developer so I'm bound to be doing something wrong.

Any help or suggestions appreciated.

[KABELI]

 Hello I am new to power BI , and I can not pass the first stage where you import data from Excel. It hungs on " Working on it"

[dcrow5378]

Same issues, happening with all reports every day.  Upgraded VM memory, still remains.

[IntaBruce · Accepted solution]

I think I've fixed it.  I don't know why this worked but switching off all Preview Featues seems to have done the trick.

I haven't played around with different combinations of the features to see which one was the culprit but for now turning them all off will have to do.

I'd love to know if anyone, especially from Microsoft, could shed any more light here.

[Yanskie]

Thanks @IntaBruce , it works like a charm!

[Anonymous]

I have pretty close to smashing my computer due to this issue. We sent astronauts to the freaking moon in the 60s, while m-r-ns of today at Microsoft can't build something that just works. Apologies for the harsh words, but this is happening every 10 minutes to me. I tried turning off all preview features just now, will see if it lasts!

[dcrow5378]

Same issue!

[at_r1sk]

Having same problem so will try this. Problem has also been flagged here.

[IntaBruce]

Okay, so this is now even more frustrating.  I have rebuild my model and it is MUCH smaller, with very few calculated columns in Power BI, I basically started again and haveven't even finished, but I'm getting the "Working on it" freeze already.  So there must be something else at play, but what can it be? 😩 😭

[Deku]

Open up task manager and see how much RAM and CPU overhead you have when performing operations on the model

[IntaBruce]

See, I'm not stressing the resourceses, but I do wonder why Power BI has 50 processes running 😕

[IntaBruce]

I did check that as you suggested, but since my workstation has 128 GB, that isn't the problem.

[Alex_Sawdo]

Generally, I've found that having too many calculated tables/columns leads to severe performance issues as every time you modify the data model in any way (such as adding a measure, modifying a relationship, etc.) will cause every calculated table/column to re-calculate across the entire model. My personal suggestion is to limit the amount of calculated tables/columns directly in Power BI and try to off-load these structures into a better environment (such as SQL or even Excel if needed). 

[IntaBruce]

That makes sense.  Since I started out on my Power BI journey I have gradually started doing more transformations and things like table joins in Power Query before the data gets to Power BI, maybe I need to go back and look for more opportunities to do that.

[Deku]

If you do your model changes you can bunch a number of transactions together before committing to the model.

You could also consider using parameters to filter tables when developing local, to reduce model size. Then removing when deployed in the service.

You can also consider increasing your RAM as tabular models are cached in RAM