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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
sgallo
Advocate IV

Since the last update the ever loading circle issue seems to be stopped. I also tried to leave PBI open in the background for half an hour and did not freeze.

We'll now see if this is not going to happen anymore. Thanks

PVO3
Impactful Individual

Agree. Haven't run into the problem since March update.

I don't want to get ahead of things without an official statement, but it appears to be solved. Fingers crossed.

djs1984
Frequent Visitor

It's now almost April and this is still happening. 

fhendric
Regular Visitor

Just updated to 2.103.661.0 64-bit (March 2022)

 

Issue is still happening I have to End Process 15x a day via Task Manager, the nightmare is still going on.

 

Lots of person in my company just accepted that issue, getting use to it and crash/ restart the soft all days.

 

We now have to start thinking moving to another tool, Power BI seems to be a victim of his own success, being slower and weaker update after update since many months (laptops work perfectly).

jaap_olsthoorn
Advocate II

Hey @fhendric I think it might be useful to be very specific about the way your organisation connects to the data source, what data source it is etc. For most of us (judging from the responses here), this problem is fixed in 90% of cases (I went from 5 a day to maybe 2 a week), but with your combination of data source and connection type it clearly hasn't worked. Maybe if you specify you issue more, MS can help your specific case better.

djs1984
Frequent Visitor

To those who have solved the issue: is it better to connect to the data source via Import or Direct Query?

jaap_olsthoorn
Advocate II

We use neither. We have one "master file" that contains our data model, and lots of report files that connect to that single source of truth data model in the service. The master file itself uses import (but that never had freezing issues).

 

If you have a choice, and the amount of data isn't too much, Import is always favoured over DirectQuery. Directquery is much slower than import (which uses the crazy-fast Vertipaq engine). Directquery is a great solution if you need real-time data or the database you need to access is very very big and loading it into the powerbi service is not a realistic scenario.

fraza
Frequent Visitor

@djs1984   The original issue for this thread only related to Direct Query.  Importing data does not relate to this discussion.  If you can import the data though, for most people should fix the issues in this thread.

 

I now have had 2 hang events in a week as apposed to 10+ a day.  Changing nothing. Only updated to March release. Always using Direct Query.

djs1984
Frequent Visitor

@fraza Understood. Though the argument could be made that since switching to Import appears to have fixed the issue for 90% of users that Importing does now relate to the discussion at this point in the thread.

 

At any rate, I don't think importing is an option for us - 4 million rows of data in just one of 12 tables. It's a live report that refreshes regularly thoughout the day. It was happening a lot on the Windows 10 machine. We've recently upgraded to new machines running W11 - very high spec, i9-9900k, 64GB RAM, M.2 drive etc. And it still happens constantly. Also running the March version.

 

These reports were typically powered by SSAS, though since switching to Dynamics Power BI seemed to be the better option in terms of integration.

 

Very frustrating, though I've found leaving it for 30 mins or so eventually unfreezes. Either that or Task Manager and force close and then recover the files. 

jaap_olsthoorn
Advocate II

I think you may have misunderstood our posts. This whole issue (freezing with twirling loading icon) has never occurred with import reports. This issue only occurs with directquery, powerbi datasets as data sources and possibly data flows (though I haven't heard anyone about that). Noone in this thread has made the switch to import to fix their issue. The issue was 90% fixed for us because of the update that MS pushed.

 

By the way: 4M rows is not a problem, PowerBI can handle that easily using import. It might take a while to refresh the dataset, but if you use incremental loading even that will not be an issue.