Power BI slow for external users

[ellac]

Hi community!

We have a report published to an app for our organization's external users (~100 users), which means we've invited them to our Azure AD as guest users for them to be able to view this report on our PBI tenant. The report has a connection to our enterprise semantic model in AAS. Everything works fine except the report performance is so extremely bad for the external users. For me and my colleagues (who are obviously part of the organization) the report visuals load in a second or two, but for the external users it can take up to 5 minutes to load.

Does anyone have an idea on why this is happening? And what can we do to improve performance (besides upgrading our AAS tier or optimizing the report)?

Thanks in advance!

/Ella

[v-yueyunzh-msft]

Hi , @ellac 

According to my understanding of report presentation and interactive performance in Power BI, it is mainly based on three modules, one is the capacity of your report (shared or private), one is the performance of your report itself (including the complexity of data transformation and the amount of visuals), and the last is the performance of the data source (this problem is only for reports that use DQ or LC mode to connect directly to the data source), because for these datasets you need to send queries to the data source in real time. The speed of the data source response and query played a decisive role. According to your problem description, your internal users and external users are invited to your tenant, in the same capacity, and access the same report, then the first two points can be directly excluded, we focus on the third, you need to first confirm whether you are using a DQ or LC mode directly connected to the data source report, if so, may only narrow down the root cause of the problem to your data source. I think you can confirm if the AAS layer data source will recognize the user's AAD credentials and distinguish between external and internal users. Thank you so much!

This is another document about the troubleshooting flowchart of slow report loading, please check out:

Troubleshoot report performance in Power BI - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

Thank you for your time and sharing, and thank you for your support and understanding of PowerBI! 

Best Regards,

Aniya Zhang

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[ellac]

Hi @v-yueyunzh-msft ,

Thanks for your answer! For this report we're using a live connection. My concern is why the performance differ so much between the users...? But it's maybe normal since the AAS layer needs to recognize the user's AAD credentials, and that process is more complex for guest users... One more thing, the report is only used by these external guest users, so they don't have to "compete" with the internal users.

Best regards,

Ella