Power BI using 90+% CPU while doing.. what?

Question

I have a 9Mb PBIX containing small tables and one table with 250k rows. Data imported from various xlsx & JSON sources. Machine is Windows 10 Pro, 2.6GHz, 64 bit, 16GB RAM.

On the Power BI service online the performance is ok, but on desktop it's practically unworkable. With task manager I can see that it is using 7Mb of memory, but almost 100% CPU, half an hour after opening - while on a blank tab with no visualisations.

I don't understand what it is doing in the background and how I can improve the situation.

There is the 'Allow data preview to download in the background' setting, but I think this is only relevant to the query editor? Would clearing the cache or changing cache settings help?

I am aware of performance analyzer and the query diagnostics tools, but neither seem relevant since the queries are not refreshing and there are no visualisations loading.

Am at a bit of a loss - any help greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Answer 1

Update: Having disabled parallel load and background refresh in Data load settings I noticed that finally the issue seemed to go away (though not immediately). Eventually, when reopening the pbix, mashup containers did not appear and CPU and memory was not being killed. Then at some point Power BI got stuck and had to close and the problem reappeared even though the data load settings were still disabled. Restarting the machine seemed to clear the problem once again.

It seems then, that some zombie processes can persist through application close and re-open. Has anyone else noticed this, can confirm or refute it, suggest what is going on or any steps on how to avoid/prevent? It's very annoying! Thanks

Answer 2

I have also noticed the same issue, for opening 5 mb pbix file, power bi eating 12 GB of memory, and 90%+ CPU utilization, Power BI Desktop is poorly managed product by Microsoft.