We are using SSRS 2008 (not R2) and I'm looking to move away from individually scheduled subscriptions to a shared schedule to make it easier to manage. However, we have some server resource constraints(SAN) that lead us to be extra cautious on scheduling too many reports to run at the same time. When a shared schedule is used, do all of the reports configured to use it start executing as soon as that window starts or is there some kind of control over how many run at a time? Can they be configured to run sequentially? From what I've read I'm assuming that everything kicks off at once and that there is no way to modify this from the SSRS web application. I'm hesitant to modify the underlying agent job because my objective is to reduce to complexity of our subscription setup; however, I would be interested to hear if there is a sensible way to do it. Ideally they would run in some kind of succession or with some kind of limit to how many execute at a time.

You can read in Dean's blog a little more about subscriptions and how they work in Reporting Services , http://blogs.msdn.com/b/deanka/archive/2009/01/13/diagnosing-and-troubleshooting-subscriptions.aspx. The short answer to your question is not all the reports are going to start to execute in parallel. When the schedule happens it will insert a row in a table per each one of your subscriptions, the Reporting Services Service will query this table and start to process the reports, there is a finite amount of threads per cpu to process those reports (the detail explanation is in Deans blog) Jaime - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jtarquino/ This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights

This answers my question and then some. From the blog article you provided... When the subscription runs several things happen: - The SQL Server Agent job fires and puts a row in the Event table in the RS catalog with the settings necessary to process the subscription - The RS server service has a limited number of threads (2 per CPU) that poll the Event table every few seconds looking for subscriptions to process I feel comfortable moving forward now better understanding how SSRS/SQL processes the subscriptions and that they wouldn't be all firing at once if using a shared schedule. Thank you!