I was wondering what the process flow is for running/rendering reports using reporting services. If I go to Report Manager and browse to my report, punch in my parmameters, and run the report it takes (say) 5 seconds to render the first page of 60. Then I click the "last page" button and it takes another 40 seconds before it shows me the last page. So that process takes 45 seconds. Then if I go to export to PDF it takes another 30 seconds, so we get 1 minute and 15 seconds. Now if I use a URL that has all the parameters pre-set and the render format set to PDF, it still takes 1 minute and 15 seconds... for some reason I was thinking it would perhaps be faster. Is this because it renders the report "internally" as the RPL or report web format and then once that finishes it sort of "prints that" or "sends that" data to the Excel, PDF, Word, whatever export converter and then that program comes back with the final result?

Internally, Reporting Services always renders to an internal intermediate rendering format - even for HTML or any other format - first. If you navigate to a report in Report Manager and then choose the Export option, you are actually rendering the report first to HTML and then to PDF. After the intermediate rendering, the queries should nt run again unless you refresh the report or change a parameter value. The PDF renderer is known to be slower than others because PDF is a more complex format so you can't compare each rendering time apples to apples. Rather than using Report Manager to view HTML & then export to PDF, it should be faster to get the URL for the report on the report server and append the PDF render fomat command like this: http://ReportServerName/ReportServer/Pages/ReportViewer.aspx?/FolderName/ReportName&rs:Format=PDF I hope this is helpful Paul Turley, MVP [Hitachi Consulting] SQLServerBIBlog.com

That makes sense, I was using the URL path with parms appended (like in your example) and noticed it still took basically the same amount of time as if I just ran the report and then clicked export to PDF. So that makes sense that it renders it to its own internal format and then exports it to "whatever" the user needs to see. Thanks.