Forum Discussion
Increasing session timeout for Paginated Reports in Microsoft Fabric
I am seeking guidance on extending the session duration for Paginated Reports within Microsoft Fabric.
Current Setup:
Environment: Microsoft Fabric Workspace (F-Capacity)
Report Tool: Power BI Report Builder
Data Source: Fabric SQL Endpoint
Attempted Fixes: I have already appended Connect Timeout=600; to the connection string, but the issue persists.
The Problem: The report processes a large dataset and takes significant time to generate. Before the rendering completes, the browser session expires, resulting in a timeout error. It appears the web-level session limit is being hit before the data can be fully served.
Are there specific settings in the Fabric Admin Portal or Capacity settings to increase the Web/Portal session timeout for paginated content?
Paginated reports have the potential to do some serious damage to the CUs on your capacities. Avoid them whereever possible.
There are capacity settings where you can control the timeout value for Power BI workloads
But be careful - the higher you set that the more your users will hammer the CUs.
1) Optimize the report
Start by looking at what the report is actually returning. If you’re pulling a large, detailed dataset or doing heavy grouping and expressions inside Report Builder, render times will increase quickly. In most cases I’ve seen, long-running paginated reports are simply doing too much work at query time.
2) Use parameters to limit scope
Avoid loading everything by default. Introduce parameters (date range, region, etc.) and make them required. This forces the report to run on a smaller slice of data and usually brings execution time down to a reasonable level.
3) Pre-stage data in Fabric
Since you’re already using Fabric, push the heavy lifting to the SQL endpoint, Warehouse, or Lakehouse. Pre-aggregate or shape the data there, and let the paginated report just read a clean, ready dataset. This is often the biggest improvement you can make.
5 Replies
Hi itsaalok
I have seen this happen in the past and whilst the Timeout might be to little having five minutes in order for a report to run it is significantly long amount of time. My recommendation would be is to see if you can create aggregated tables from your SQL endpoint instead of potentially running aggregations as part of the query. The other option is to also see if you can create groups within your Paginated report would then only get a subset of the data and when they expanded it would then run another query to get over the timeout issue.
Paginated reports have the potential to do some serious damage to the CUs on your capacities. Avoid them whereever possible.
There are capacity settings where you can control the timeout value for Power BI workloads
But be careful - the higher you set that the more your users will hammer the CUs.
1) Optimize the report
Start by looking at what the report is actually returning. If you’re pulling a large, detailed dataset or doing heavy grouping and expressions inside Report Builder, render times will increase quickly. In most cases I’ve seen, long-running paginated reports are simply doing too much work at query time.
2) Use parameters to limit scope
Avoid loading everything by default. Introduce parameters (date range, region, etc.) and make them required. This forces the report to run on a smaller slice of data and usually brings execution time down to a reasonable level.
3) Pre-stage data in Fabric
Since you’re already using Fabric, push the heavy lifting to the SQL endpoint, Warehouse, or Lakehouse. Pre-aggregate or shape the data there, and let the paginated report just read a clean, ready dataset. This is often the biggest improvement you can make.
Hi itsaalok
Thank you for reaching out to the Microsoft Fabric Forum Community.
GilbertQ lbendlin cengizhanarslan Thanks for the inputs
I hope the information provided by users was helpful. If you still have questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to the community.
Hi itsaalok
Hope everything’s going smoothly on your end. I wanted to check if the issue got sorted. if you have any other issues please reach community.
