Power BI App won't render. Scheduled Refreshes failing.

[accortdr]

I have a Power BI App with 4 reports in it. We haven't made any updates to any of the reports in the app in 2 + weeks and the data refreshes 2x / day. It is consistently taken 20 minutes for the last few months for these refreshes, but yesterday the refreshes started timing out (taken more than 120 minutes) and the App will no longer open. It just hangs in "building your app" when you try to open it.

I am not sure if the timed out scheduled refreshes have something to do with this, I would think that the latestet dataset prior to the most recent refresh would still render. 

What I've tested:

• The datasets are < 1GB per dataset (per Power BI Pro limits)
• The Workspace contains <10GB (per Workspace limits)
• Gateway monitoring logs show successful refreshes across the board since February (when we set it up)
• I was able to publish the "main" report to a separate workspace and manually push a refresh and open the report from there.
  • I can go this route if needed, but would have to reconfigure the user access which is not preferred + we don't why this is happening so I am not sure it wouldn't happen again.

Anyone have any thoughts or suggestions?

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Hi @accortdr ,

To my knowledge, if it is heavily loaded(such as many reports start refreshing at the same time) when the data refresh occurs, then it may be waiting in the queue. And it's recommended that you need at least two times more space available than your dataset for refresh.

Please first make sure that your gateway is the latest version. Then I would suggest testing the refresh manually, by using the Refresh Now option from the dataset. Wait for that to complete and see how long it takes.

If it fails as well, please consider reducing the size or complexity of your dataset, or consider breaking the dataset into smaller pieces.

For  It just hangs in "building your app" when you try to open it  ,I found a workaround that the app loads fine after F5 has been pressed.

Best Regards,
Eyelyn Qin
If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[accortdr]

Thank you for your recommendation @Anonymous. I removed a few hidden pages from the report to reduce the number of pages in the report. I then removed the report from the app all together and republished this new "slimmer" version of the pbix file. This seems to have helped in the interim. I will definitely test out the F5 method should this happen again. 

We are also in the process of cutting the main report into smaller chunks to reduce the size of individual datasets.