Laconic card has already become a common tool for many Power BI developers. We have received a lot of screenshots showcasing the free version of this visual.
However, having many instances of Laconic Card in one report page (not uncommon in large KPI-based dashboards) results in degraded overall report performance. Even when you make sure that each individual card visual is rendered quite quickly, a whole bunch of them will take time to appear on the users screens.
This is caused mainly by sequential processing within Power BI and is behavior observed in any report containing many visual elements in it. The service queries the data source for every one of your visuals individually. And then renders them individually in sequence as well.
There are waiting times involved in the total time to show a fully rendered report. And no matter how good your query performance is, 2 or more card visuals will always seem to appear one after another, giving the impression of a slow running report.
We solved this with the Laconic Card PRO version.
With this custom visual for Power BI you are able to generate all of your cards in one visualization. This means that there is only one query sent to your data source and only one rendering process before the visual appears in your users browser.
In real life tests we can see performance gains of about 10 seconds when a report with 15 cards is being rendered. The difference is quite dramatic and changes the customers experience quite significantly.
If you want happy KPI dashboard users, grab your copy of Laconic Card PRO from AppSource and publish that blazing fast report ASAP.