AX / Dynamics 365 For Finance and Operations blog

SQL Server Reporting Services starts up slowly after a period of inactivity when I try to access the reports page. Sometimes it’s slow accessing it just half an hour later, sometimes hours later, or next day, but I can’t figure out why or the pattern behind it?

SSRS has a XML configuration file with a setting for “Recycle Time“. The recycle time is a scheduled timer in minutes based on when the last time SSRS has been manually restarted by a user. When a recycle occurs idle resources within SSRS are freed. This value can be changed to allow SSRS to keep resources for a longer period to prevent slowdowns due to re-initializing SSRS resources. SSRS is configured to recycle itself every 720 minutes, or 12 hours as shown below in the sample rsreportserver.config configuration file. This file is located in your SSRS installation directory, for example C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services\SSRS\ReportServer

‹Service›
   ...
   ...
   ‹RecycleTime›720‹/RecycleTime›
   ...
   ...

It’s recommended to let SSRS recycle periodically so it doesn’t hold onto memory it no longer needs, which may be useful to the rest of your server, for example if your SQL Server instance lives on the same server (you wouldn’t want SSRS bottlenecking the rest of your SQL Server instance).

If you are able to adjust it to a recycle frequency that happens off-hours that may be best, as noted in this article. Otherwise the correct value is 0 to disable it

‹Service›
   ...
   ...
   ‹RecycleTime›0‹/RecycleTime›
   ...
   ...