Understanding memory used by Power BI - Unplugged #7

How does Power BI consume memory? How do you read the right memory numbers?
Learn how to use Task Manager and how to correctly interpret the numbers provided by the several processes used by Power BI when you open a PBIX file. In order to do that, we have to introduce a few concepts like process and virtual memory in Windows – just the minimum required to understand what is going on.
This way, you can understand whether you have a memory issue on your PC or not, and what is causing that!

#unplugged #dax #powerbi

[DIGITAL_COOKING]

great video as usual, what I like about this channel is
the right subject selected of the problems we face in practice

[sue_bayes]

Absolutely fascinating and answered many questions that I hadn't even internalised yet. I had to watch certain parts a couple of times, and have no doubt I'll refer to this again. Will be interesting to see the results when using Teams and working on BI at the same time. Also really helped breakdown the different parts of Power BI to understand usage. Thank you. Loving the unplugged format.

[yippiekyoo]

Really awesome, now I understand more how the background processes are working, thus will help me to improve my dashboards.

[babagio]

Ciao Marco, just discovered and subscribed immediately, your channel. Great one! Thanks you both for such knowledge you spread. ("già digerito, non sò come dirlo"). This #unplugged playlist is the right thing in the right moment. A big hug and stay safe!

[bandishgupta]

Amazing Video... Thanks for all the information Marco !!

[roadtech]

Amazing explanation! Thanks for sharing knowledge!

[saharlatifi]

Great video! Very informative. Thanks Marco.

[abhijeetghosh]

Very informative. Would always be useful while during optimization. Thanks Marco for sharing this 👍☺️

[youneshamza]

you're great, period !
A star !

[anilredddykanthala]

Really must know subject for powerbi users

[gustavobarbosa]

very enligntening, Marco! Thank you!

However, I have been facing a problem that for me is quite weird. I hve a model with a fact table with around 1M rows. When I create a new measure in another table where I just store measures, PBI takes a lot of time between when I press Enter and the moment it again accepts new inputs. I cannot understand why this happens, because at this point I did not include the measure in any visualization (I just created it), and I would believe that simply creating the measure should have no impact on processing time. I don’t know if you ever faced this issue, if you did maybe you could include it in a video dealing with how PBI stores and deals with measures.

Thank you so much for all the valuable information yours and Alberto’s videos provide to the PBI community!!

[elrevesyelderecho]

12:00 Quick question Marco. How much is the memory ram of your PC? What about the processor? How many cores? Speed? 5 Cores and 2. Something Ghz? Just to have a full scope of the exercise. Thanks.

[akhileshkumar_gupta]

Hi Marco - Good Morning first of all! I have a measure and I want to find average of the same measure but I couldn't in power bi using DAX, I don't know error coming up might be not aware of this back session. Overall I want your suggestion on this to do that. I have logic to find the same calculation using alternate choice that would be sum of all job done divided by the no. of users. But I need exactly the average of production they did by averaging of each row of that table. I'm eagerly waiting your response.

[diogobueno]

Grazie per il video!!
What happens if I have just simple mesures like CALCULATE(SUM()), and even in this case my memory in the publicated dashboards the table breaks?

[Sreemanustories]

Can you please explain this when powerbi is launched through browser

[Dias-fpuo]

Thank you for a great video Marco! Whenever I refresh my dataset the Analysis services engine consumes around 2GB (10x times more memory than mashup engine). I thought it should be vice versa since Power Query is mainly being used (I have around 40+ tables and my PBIX file size is around 50MB). Do you know if it is normal and do you have video or an article which explains how to deal with it? Thank you!

[seez]

Awesome. TLDR. I am stuck with 16GB (LPDDR soldiered onboard). Does increasing swap file manually in Windows10 makes sense for PowerBI?

[alexkim]

Thanks for sharing, Marco. Can you share with us your computer's specs? I am amazed that you're opening a 1GB file and your CPU and Memory usage is still very low.

Mine on the other hand, is consuming 83% CPU and 72% memory when I open a 100KB pbix. I am guessing it has very complex queries, but that's beside the point. What are your specs?

[hectorpatinosanchez]

Hi, Marco! Thank you for all the videos you and your team make. It's really incredible how such a quality content can be available for everbody every week. I really appreciate the way you focus in problems we all are facing in daily work.

I'm having real issues dealing with memory usage in Power Query Editor and, even worse, in Advance Editor. I usually write some M to make a clean model form data sources that are not well structured . I observe that with a few (10 is enough) data sources, the performance starts to be incredibly low, making the editor almost unusable. I know your researching and informative efforts is more oriented to DAX than M, but sometimes (maybe always) some M is necessary to build a clean model (This can be a discussion point, I know. Leverage between DAX and M is a difficult topic for me and other developers).

Have you found the origin of this memory usage? If so, have you found some strategies to avoid it?

Thank you in advance and thank you again for your incredible work.

[workstuff]

With me at the helm; Short answer - all of it ;)