Power BI Refresh Error:
Capacity is overloaded

What does this error mean?

The Power BI Premium capacity hosting this workspace has run out of resources. Refresh jobs are queued, throttled, or rejected when capacity CPU or memory is saturated.

Common causes

• 1Multiple large datasets are refreshing simultaneously, exhausting available memory
• 2A single dataset with a very high cardinality causes memory pressure for all other operations
• 3Report queries from many concurrent users are competing with background refresh operations
• 4The capacity SKU is undersized for the number of workspaces and datasets it hosts
• 5Auto-scale is not enabled and capacity spikes cannot be handled by the base SKU

How to fix it

1. 1Open the Premium Capacity Metrics app to identify which workspaces and datasets consume the most CPU and memory
2. 2Enable capacity auto-scale (if available in your region) to handle peak loads
3. 3Stagger refresh schedules to avoid simultaneous peaks — spread refreshes across different hours
4. 4Move large or frequently-refreshed datasets to a dedicated capacity to isolate their resource usage
5. 5Enable incremental refresh for the largest datasets to reduce per-refresh memory requirements

Other capacity errors