Model Viewer Panel keeps freezing on me

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I have been playing with the Power BI viewer for a little while now however i am seeing issues with the viewer from time to time, so much so that it makes me nervous about showing/sharing it because it just keeps flaking out on me. Sometimes the viewer functions fine and others it either freezes with whatever page filters it had applied last or else it simply does nothing and shows the blue background with the “Help” and “Getting Started” buttons. Not sure why this is happening. My model is from Revit and it consists purely of rooms (1500 of them) and some project parameter data used to filter and sort them. Not sure how to go about diagnosing this further really - looking for some ideas on what may cause the viewer to tank.

If i delete the viewer and add a fresh one this works fine for a while then the same happens… It sort of feels like some sort of caching/buffer issue maybe?

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Hey @Joe , welcome to the community It’s great that you are putting Speckle through its paces in your daily workflows.

You say you have been using the PowerBI and Revit Connectors for a while, are the slowdowns/glitches you describe something that has been recently happening or is it consistent in your whole time of using the viewer?

We have a few isolated reports like yours but each manifests in slightly different ways and it is tricky to pin down commonalities.

Could you confirm:

  • Connector version data was sent using Revit
  • Dashboard is local or online-hosted
  • Is the freezing related to model size or independent
  • What is the environment you are using the PowerBI viewer (solo machine, corporate network, VPN, etc)

As many data points as we can think of might make something clearer.

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Hi Jonathon,

So yeah i think this is probably going to be tricky to nail down but you never know. In terms of when this happened. For the last couple of weeks i have been happily pushing rooms from Revit and pulling them into the PowerBI viewer with no issues. This week however something appears to have changed and i am now seeing these issues with the viewer as in it simply appears to freeze and cannot be revived. My environment is as follows:

  • Revit Connector version 2.15.2
  • Dashboard is local
  • Freezing does not appear to be model size based as i have been leveraging all the rooms in the model over the last few weeks without issue. The only thing that has changed is the number of additional parameters i have in the model and are exposing within PowerBI. Initially i was purely taking approx. 8 parameters and this is now expanded to maybe 25.
  • My PowerBI is running on a local machine connected to a cooperate network via VPN, i have however seen the same behavior when inside the office network so i dont believe the VPN could be the issue.
  • My PowerBI is version 2.121.903.0 64-bit (September 2023)

The only thing i have tried in terms of fixing is to update by graphics driver which i thought may be related however this doesn’t appear to have made any difference. The card i am using is a Nvidia Quadro P600 now running version 537.42.

My dashboard contains the viewer, 1 x Table & 22 slicers. Interestingly one of those slicers appears to be able to kickstart the viewer however once activated the viewer again freezes even when the slicer is toggled.

Next steps would be to rebuild the dashboard from scratch again and see if the viewer plays ball at all and if it does then see at what point it stops doing so. Any other ideas would be welcomed… (one may well be to try this on a different machine and see if i get the same issue).

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This is all gold-level context, thanks @Joe . We’ll investigate.

The icing on the cake would be if you could share a Project Stream with us. (can be via DM) (and sprinkles would be a dashboard)

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DM sent with stream and dashboard - thank you for taking a look at this for me.

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Currently rebuilding my dashboard and noticed that some of my parameters from Revit are “Yes/No” type however not all rooms have had any inputs into some of the parameters meaning they remain neither a Yes or No within Revit. This ports to PowerBI as a “null” value and i am now wondering if this could be a contributing factor…

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It shouldn’t be. At least not a performance hit.

Reporting wise is a different story. There are many steps involved in ETL that PowerBI doesn’t make easy. It is a very accessible tool, but most mature processes don’t expect perfect data out-of-the-box, and, normally, you decide on Transform, which will eventually be part of your presentation (slicers and filters, etc.) as you are data wrangling.

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