Data Refresh Timeout Limit for P1, P2 and P3? Timeout Issue

There is no publicly known timeout limit for the data refresh. But we were told via a premium support case that the effective time out is 2 hours via the on-premise gateway. This may be different for cloud connections. This a bit grey area, Microsoft is not doing the utmost effort to publicize the behind the scene limits. For most people they are irrelevent anyway.

On the other hand we were told that there is a bug around the timeouts, which they are actively working on. We were let known that a fix is anticipated by the beginning of next week (18th June). Certainly exact date cannot be told as they don't patch all their tenants at the same time.

Regarding expected refresh time vs. Desktop. That depends on the network you have. If your PBI Desktop runs in the cloud next to the OPC source, then it is fair to assume that it will be faster than PBI Service from Azure.

Please note that the performance of the data refresh in PBI Service depends on the workload that your premium capacity is undertaking. If it is heavily loaded when the data refresh occurs, then it may be waiting in the queue, then the processing capacity to handle it once it began may be hampered by higher priority tasks, such as people opening reports.

So sadly there is no exact number for the expected performance or limit. If you would like to get to the very limit of the system, then the best that you can do is to have a dedicated premium capacity for your scenario, and do a test run there. Have nothing else doing anything in the capacity, and run a data refresh. Then you will see the true performance peak, which you could expect as the best case scenario.