Refresh failed due to not enough memory after PowerBI license type change

[Jon_S]

We have a semantic model in a PowerBI Pro license environment that has a daily scheduled refresh.  It has run successfully without issue for about 18 months.  The file size is about 160mb.  

We recently upgraded to PowerBI Premium.  The refresh began failing every day, with the error message in italics below.  The refrresh failed for about  7 days in a row.  We downgraded back to Pro, and the issue went away, and the model refreshed successfully each day following the downgrade.  What would cause this error when using Premium but not Pro?  Any guidance on how to resolve as we'd like to upgrade to Premium for other features.

Refresh failed:

"Model Name has failed to refresh.
Failure details: The last refresh attempt failed because of an internal service error. This is usually a transient issue. If you try again later and still see this message, contact support.

Resource Governing: This operation was canceled because there wasn't enough memory to finish running it. Either reduce the memory footprint of your dataset by doing things such as limiting the amount of imported data, or if using Power BI Premium, increase the memory of the Premium capacity where this dataset is hosted. More details: consumed memory 2429 MB, memory limit 2331 MB, database size before command execution 740 MB"

[v-tianyich-msft]

Hi @Jon_S ,

Whether there are multiple refresh tasks going on at the same time, as there is a concurrency limit in PowerBI Premium, try adjusting the refresh time period for this semantic model.

Hope it helps!

Best regards,
Community Support Team_ Scott Chang

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

[Jon_S]

The main confusion here is the refresh works fine on the less expensive, less feature-rich SKU of PowerBI Pro but fails for the more expensive, more feature-rich PowerBI premium?  The scheduled time and everything else is the same.  Is there a concurrency limit in Premium but not in Pro?

[SaiTejaTalasila]

Hi @Jon_S ,

For more details please do some analysis on your capacity metrics report data or log analytics data for more details.

https://blog.crossjoin.co.uk/2023/05/14/power-bi-automatic-refresh-retries/amp/

Thanks,

Sai Teja 

[mattiasdesmet]

Is this a P1 capacity? This would normally have a dataset limit of 25GB, so these numbers look low at first sight -  What is Power BI Premium? - Power BI | Microsoft Learn 

Did you verify the settings for your Premium capacity, in case your admin set some limitations on memory limits? How to configure workloads in Power BI Premium - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

Make sure also to check the model best practices Data reduction techniques for Import modeling - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

Do you do any memory intensive processing while refreshing the dataset? You might need to look at incremental refresh.

Another quick win (with some disadvantages) is to enable Large Dataset Storage format, but also this I would not think you need at this point.

You could use DAX Studio to verify the size of your model when it refreshes ok in Pro, and identify memory usage.

These sets of articles also give a better understanding of "memory" related issues/troubleshooting in PowerBI 

Power BI semantic model memory errors, part 1: model size

[Jon_S]

The main confusion here is the refresh works fine on the less expensive, less feature-rich SKU of PowerBI Pro but fails for the more expensive, more feature-rich PowerBI premium?  

Are there memory limits that exist in premium that do not exist in Pro?

[SaiTejaTalasila]

Hi @Jon_S ,

Please check your capacity settings in admin portal.

Thanks,

Sai Teja 

[Jon_S]

Thanks, we're looking there and researching the different settings, but it is not clear what we should be changing, if anything. When we upgrade our license type from Pro to Premium, does that change a setting that results in lower performance which is why the error occurs in Premium but not in Pro?