General architectural guidance

This section presents general architectural best practices that can help with performance.

Planning data and cache refresh schedules

A sometimes-overlooked consideration is how fresh an Import dataset's sources are. There is no point refreshing a dataset multiple times a day if it relies on an external data mart that is only refreshed nightly. This adds an unnecessary load to data sources and the Power BI service.

Look at your environment to see when refresh operations are happening and how long they are taking. If many are happening in parallel, this could slow down other operations due to intense CPU and memory usage. The effect can be larger with Power BI Premium. Consider working with dataset owners to remove unnecessary refreshes or change timings so that they do not occur altogether, but are potentially staggered instead. A data refresh in progress can require as much additional memory as the dataset itself, sometimes more if the...