We’ve been using Power BI at work for a while but the desktop performance is horrific – sometimes it locks the entire PC, sometimes takes minutes from a mouse click to anything happening (eg creating a new measure).

Its the same on all the machines here and the data models aren’t huge (10M or so and it’s still rubbish). Just wondering how others get on with it as I’ve heard real time virus protection can cause issues but before I start arguing about that with the IT policy wonks I’d like some backup to say it shouldn’t be this bad.

We’ve just started using it and we’ve had to get new iPads for everyone using it as it crashed the ones they were using 🙂

I’ve only had limited experience with it, but found it to be a RAM-hungry beastie. It was temperamental on ‘normal’ PCs, but was tickity-boo on one with plenty RAM.

Gary was that the desktop app killing the ipads or the online service? RAM is a tricky one to fix, the machines have 4Gb and the aforementioned IT wonks aren’t exactly welcoming when we ask for more.

Not too bad with 8GB, quite snappy on my PC with 64GB (both with SSDs). Very dependent on dataset size and the complexity of what you’re doing with it though. Real-time antivirus scanning can play havoc with anything like this that’s doing lots of read/write to disk.

The Desktop software is really for two things: a free way to try it out, and for developing stuff to put in the powerbi.com service (or the on-prem version if your company has the £££).

Haven’t had any problems at all with a fair amount of data and it seems way quicker than any other way I’ve tried to do analysis. If you’ve got the file on a server is it a network thing? ie. Does moving it onto your computer change things?

It’s brutal on performance. I use the app on a chunky desktop then share the reports on O365 which means people don’t get the same pain as me.