Severe Report Rendering Performance Degradation on May 2021 release

[daxman]

Anyone else experiencing report rendering performance issues in this release of Power BI Report Server?

One of our customers PBI Report Servers was upgraded to May 2021, and after about a week many of the reports we have on the server now take several minutes to render. This doesn't apply to all reports, and we have had challenges tracking down why certain reports are slow to render and why others only take a few seconds. The CPU and Memory on the Report Server are under 40% utilization, so we aren't resource constrained. The content database has plenty of room allocated and its' server not resource constrained either. Here is the an example of some of the odd behavior we are seeing:

If I create a brand new report with a one data source, one data table, and a single table visualization on a blank canvas and upload it to the Report Server, it takes 3 minutes to render on average. This file is less than 1 MB. This file can be authored in Jan 2021 or May 2021 release of PBI Desktop for RS. Same result.

An existing report we have that is 300MB, has several pages, background images, and multiple data sources takes less than 5 seconds to render every time. If I take this same report and upload it to a different directory as a "new report", it performs just as well.

All reports have not been configured with a scheduled refresh.

Is anyone else experiencing this same issue? If a Microsoft rep is reading this, I would appreciate any insight you may have into how we can better troubleshoot this issue.

Cheers

[HashamNiaz]

Hi @daxman !

Please try to investigate Report Load time using ExecutionLogs table in Power BI ReportServer DB. You can see ExecutionLog2 & ExecutionLog3 table to identify what was the report rendering / loading time previously before Power BI Report Server Upgrade and now.

Also, if you are using PortalV2, please try to revert your settings to default potral. You can use follwing script to revert to original settings; You need to run the script on Power BI Report Server DB.

/****** Script to DISABLE Portal preview  ******/

UPDATE [ReportServer].[dbo].[ConfigurationInfo]

SET [dbo].[ConfigurationInfo].Value = 'false'

Where [dbo].[ConfigurationInfo].Name = 'UsePortalV2'

Regards,

Hasham

[daxman · Accepted solution]

Hi,

We aren't using the portal preview... but we did find the solution, so wanted to post here.

The timing was purely coincidental, but there scheduled refresh was set up only days after the upgrade to the May 2021 release. That scheduled refresh was set up to run every minute of every day. This heavily affected performance on the rest of the report server (without impacting the overall CPU/Memory stats). Once we updated that refresh to run every few hours, report server performance improved significantly.