Background: We currently have per user pro-license model within our organization and Power BI content in our organization is created/shared with live connection to on-premise SSAS tabular & multidimensional cubes.
Problem: Some of the Power BI content on large cubes seem to be having performance problems, with large content and complex calculations. The performance sometimes is intermittent, sometimes content renders in <5 seconds and sometimes it turns really sluggish. This could be perhaps due to shared capacity
Question:
With Power BI Premium, I understand Capacity is provisioned through purchasing capacity nodes. Each node is composed of a number of v-cores: frontend cores and backend cores.
The frontend cores are responsible for the web service, dashboard and report document management, access rights management, scheduling, APIs, uploads and downloads, and generally for everything that relates to the user experience. The backend cores are responsible for the heavy lifting: query processing, cache management, running R servers, data refresh, natural language processing, real-time feeds, and server-side rendering of reports and images. The backend cores that do the heavy lifting are fully dedicated to you, and they will not be shared by others. The frontend cores are shared with others, and they are computed as your portion.
We would like to assess performance of our Power BI content hosting on dedicated capacity with Power BI premium however I am wondering if this would make any difference as frontend cores are shared anyway and what we could benefit from with dedicated backend cores as we connect live to on-premise cubes.
Would be great to hear your thoughts around this? Any experiences if anyone made similar assessment?
Thank you.
Regards,
Adil
