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Power BI Desktop freezes 10 times a day

Hi all,

 

I'll try to explain the issue I'm having. 

Power BI runs fine, until a random moment. Perhapse I change something in a visual or a measure, but then all my visuals start to refresh and in 90% of the time they don't recover at all and Power BI simply freezes. Sometimes I even have to do a hard reboot. The changes I'm making are very small.

 

I sometimes I have the idea it has something to do with IntelliSense and/or Microsoft Edge Webview2. Yesterday I was typing a DAX syntax and by pressing tab, it took the suggested function. Every single time I did this, Power BI desktop frooze. Also, sometimes it generates multiple Webview2 processen (screenshot). 

 

It's pretty much impossible to work at the moment. Using the most recent PBI December 2021 desktop update.

Is there a fix for this?

Webview.PNG

Status: Accepted

Hi All,

According to my research, a similar issue has been reported internally, so stay tuned. ICM: 279388210

 

In the latest update of this ICM, the engineers have found the issue is related to the WebView2 browser crashing and are working to find the root cause of this issue.

 

I will update here once I get any information.

 

But if you want to get a solution for this kind of desktop problem based on your specific situation as soon as possible, I suggest you to open a support ticket to get the direct help from the technical support team of Microsoft.

https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Community-Blog/How-to-create-a-support-ticket-in-Power-BI/ba-p/6830...

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/support/

 

Thank you very much!

 

Best Regards,

Community Support Team _Robert Qin

Comments
MFelix
Super User

I had a lot of issues on the last weeks with the freezes alongside with my colleagues. I have a report (connected in Power BI dataset) that I could not finish because of the constant freezing, not even a minor change when updated to March I was abble to do everything.

 

Not saying that the problems are fixed but believe they have made some improvments, have to continue using the new release to check if the problem persist or not.

palombie
Frequent Visitor

It makes me wonder if many users are pushing PowerBi desktop to its limits. The crashing problems started months ago and keep increasing. We spent 5 weeks with PowerBi support to finally give up: no date has been scheduled to fix notably a major bug related to the selection panel.
We are now forced to consider alternative solutions (which do not really exist...) to PowerBI because our SLA puts us in a dangerous situation with our customers.

Shelley
Continued Contributor

Have you all tried to turn off the preview feature: Power BI Desktop Infrastructure Update? This is what one of my teammates suggested doing to reduce the number of lock ups. Sounded like Microsoft may have told him this.

PVO3
Impactful Individual

Thanks Shelley.

This is indeed what MS suggested, unfortunatly it doesn't work.

Shelley
Continued Contributor

Okay, gotcha. Must depend on different environments. I did this and it helped a lot. Although it still does occur, it doesn't seem anywhere near as bad for me as it was.  It probably also depends on the type of model and/or connection too.

paul_sanders
Frequent Visitor

For me, the March release (i.e. the current one) fixes the issue of the desktop freezing in live connect mode (when connecting directly to a dataset). 

I was able to simply reproduce the issue before just by openig a live connect report, letting it sit for a few hours, and then trying to refresh any visual. I know a fix was in the March release, and I can no longer reproduce the freeze.

 

If anyone is still having the freeze issue after installing the March release, it would certainly help to make clear that it is with the latest release, and then we can make sure the product team knows there is a separate unaddressed issue.   

jaap_olsthoorn
Advocate II

@paul_sanders Same here, the authentication freezing issue seems to have been fixed. It might be best to start a new idea for unrelated crashes and freezes.

saj
Helper III
Helper III

Fingers crossed. I ran Desktop in the background having connected to a dataset. Previously PBI desktop would freeze/crash if I left it for any time. I left it on and off for the whole afternoon (nothing specific to do in PBI today) and it didn't crash.


I've got 2 people who reported issues in on Wednesday so they will test and confirm one way or another.

spowell
Frequent Visitor

I just updated to the March 2022 version and am having this problem. Power BI freezes every few minutes when attempting to modify DAX expressions. Sometimes I can get 3 or 4 edits in before it happens, but then I hear my machine's fans start whirring and have to end the process from the Task Manager. No matter how long I leave it, it never unfreezes by itself.

 

Interestingly, with one particular report I could reproduce it reliably within seconds of starting Power BI by trying to edit a particular measure with max() in the formula, although other measures were fine and when I edited this measure in Notepad and pasted in the new DAX without the max() function in it, it was also fine. I understand how a measure doing a large number of calculations could hang up the program when it's calculating, but not why that would affect just typing in the DAX editor!

 

Fortunately, turning off "Power BI Desktop infrastructure update" in Options > Preview Features seems to have worked for me for now. Spoke too soon, this is still happening, albeit less frequently, even with the infrastructure update turned off.

 

(For me this issues just started with the March 2022 update. I didn't encounter it in the February update. Haven't tried rolling back to that version yet to see if it fixes things.)

fraza
Frequent Visitor

[Update]

 

I am on day 3 of the March update and I have only had the issue of the forever spinning loading circle only once.  So it's working much better now than it has been for months. 

 

100% fixed?  - To be seen.