Forum Discussion
[Help] Power BI Report Slow on Initial Load (Live Connection)
Hi Zhinee
That “first-load slowness” is pretty common with Power BI reports using live connections, usually, it’s caused by the data source or Power BI service “warming up” caches or query plans after inactivity.Here are few workarounds:
- Schedule periodic “keep-alive” queries to prevent cache timeouts.
- Optimize your data model and queries for faster execution.
- If possible, use Import mode for critical reports needing instant load.
Did it work? 👍 A kudos would be appreciated
🟨 Mark it as a solution to help spread knowledge 💡One of the ways would be use Power Automate to trigger a dataset refresh or run a query against a semantic model using Power BI REST API every 30 minutes.
However, Microsoft does not provide official documentation specifically endorsing the practice of keep-alive queries in shared non-Premium capacity workspaces. The concept of manually initializing datasets is more of a community best-practice workaround, rather than an officially documented feature.
Could you elaborate a bit on how to do this?
- Schedule periodic “keep-alive” queries to prevent cache timeouts.
One of the ways would be use Power Automate to trigger a dataset refresh or run a query against a semantic model using Power BI REST API every 30 minutes.
However, Microsoft does not provide official documentation specifically endorsing the practice of keep-alive queries in shared non-Premium capacity workspaces. The concept of manually initializing datasets is more of a community best-practice workaround, rather than an officially documented feature.
I did try Run a query against a dataset and my query is :
EVALUATE
TOPN(1, 'SESSION_TRANS_TABLE')
and I set it run it every 30 mins, it still does not work.
Still slow on the initial load
Is there something wrong with the query or I should try to use refresh a dataset?Hello Zhinee
I'm assuming you’re in shared capacity, you may also try changing the query to a more complex one such as join or summarize,Or use
EVALUATE
TOPN(1000, 'SESSION_TRANS_TABLE'),
and Monitor whether first-load performance improves after scheduling it every 15–30 mins.But again as I mentioned in my last message, Microsoft has no official document endorsing this approach. Shared capacity can also evict datasets even shortly after refresh, so no guarantee.