How to improve performance?

[t-atgeor]

Hi,

Could you please advise on any ideas how to increase the performance of PowerBI, once it is online and shared with others? I do have in the back database 5 tables with substantial amount of data, which would increase over time. For now, the dashboard works properly, however, once reshared lags slightly.

I understand that PowerBI is not that powerful, however, I suppose there are some tricks/tips I could use to improve overall performance.

Thank you.

Atanas

[v-caliao-msft]

Hi @t-atgeor,

Based on my research, the performance lags slightly issue when refreshing data source occur not only on Power BI, but also on other report tool. Since it takes a lot of resources to refresh data.

Besides ankitpatira's suggestions you could scheduled refresh your data at free time, such as midnight. Please refer to the link below to see how to configure scheduled refresh you Power BI report.
https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-refresh-scheduled-refresh/

Regards,

Charlie Liao

[ankitpatira]

@t-atgeor Depending on the problem you're facing it can be looked at to improve performance within your report. In general I would suggest,

1 Make sure data you publish to report is only what you require ie for a sales report you only publish data for past 2-3 years if that is all going to be analysed instead using whole table.

2. Explore possibility of DirectQuery which in some cases can be better solution than Import.

3. In my experience I've realised using Page / Report level filters have better performance than using visual-level filters. 

4. Try avoiding too complex measures / calculated columns instead do them at the data source level.