Chris Webb notes a new toggle in Power Query:
However if you have just read the docs you may be wondering what these two new registry key settings actually do. In this post I’m only going to talk about one, MaxEvaluationWorkingSetInMB; I’ll leave ForegroundEvaluationContainerCount for a future post.
At various times in the past I have blogged about how, when you run a Power Query query, the query itself is executed inside a separate process called an evaluation (or mashup) container and how this process has a limit on the amount of memory it can use. Some transformations such as sorting a table, doing a group by, pivoting and unpivoting require an entire table of data to be held in memory and if these operations require more memory than the evaluation container is able to use then it starts paging and query performance gets a lot worse.
Read on to see where setting the max evaluation working set in memory can help, as well as the caveats that Chris lays out.