I've spent hours troubleshooting this and I need some fresh perspective . . .
We have a relatively simple report setup in SSRS, simple matrix with columns across the top and data points going down. The SQL query behind the report is "medium" complexity -- has some subqueries and several joins, but nothing real crazy.
Report has worked fine for months and recently has become REALLY slow. Like, 15-20 minutes to generate the report. I can clip-and-paste the SQL query from the Report Designer into SQL Mgmt Studio, replace the necessary variables, and it ruturns results in less than 2 seconds. I even went so far as to use SQL profiler to get the exact query that SSRS is executing, and clipped-and-pasted this into Mgmt Studio, still the same thing, sub-second results. The parameters and date ranges specified don't make any difference, I can set parameters to return a small dataset (< 100 rows) or a humongous one (> 10,000 rows) and still the same results; super-fast in Mgmt Studio but 20 minutes to generate the SSRS report.
Troubleshooting I've attempted so far: Deleted and re-deployed the report in SSRS. Tested in Visual Studio IDE on multiple machines and on the SSRS server, same speed (~20 minutes) both places Used SQL Profiler to monitor the SPID executing the report, captured all SQL statements being executed, and tried them individualy (and together) in Mgmt Studio -- runs fast in Mgmt Studio (< 2 seconds) Monitored server performance during report execution. Processor is pretty darn hammered during the 20 minute report generation, disk I/O is slightly above baseline