Analysis Services - Service Process

  • I performed a full process of one of my data cubes this morning and everything completed fine. However, I noticed this afternoon that three instances of the AS services were still consuming memory (via Task Manager). They are:

    msmdsrv.exe 348,956k

    msmdvldm.exe 188,988k

    msmdvldm.exe 59,932k

    These are the AS service itself and two instances of the service that runs the 'very large dimension' processing. My question is: If I know that no other cubes are being processed, is it safe to kill these process instances? Is this just a memory leak?

    Thank you,

    Michael

    Michael Weiss


    Michael Weiss

  • e... Halt, cease and desist.....

    The msmdsrv process is the Analysis Services Process, it is what is serving up the cibes. This isn't quite like Cognos, where the cube can be opened stand alone. If you're not using local cubes (currently fair assumption) then you'll need the server running for users to be able to see/query the cube(s).

    Also, the VLDM process(es) are managing your very large dimensions, these are also needed for user querying.

    Unless you have *no-one* trying/wanting to access these cubes, then I would leave them running.

    Bottom line, sure they use more resource when processing, but they're not just "cube processing" processes!!

    Hope this helps

    Steve

    Steve.

    Steve.

  • As an after thought, I am running the upsize wizard on an Access db...but I can't see why that would possibly involve those AS services. I am thinking memory leak...

    Michael Weiss


    Michael Weiss

  • Thanks, Steve...I guess I was more concerned about the amount of memory being used by the msmdvldm processes...it just seemed really high compared to what I was used to seeing. However, what you are saying is that there is management processes of the large dimensions going on in the background if I understand you correctly?

    Thank you,

    Michael


    Michael Weiss

  • Hi Michael,

    yes, there is mem management happening is the background.

    Off the top of my head, I can't remember the setting that determines when the VLDM comes into play (could be Large Dimension Size , would be obvious 🙂 ), but a great place to start to get an understanding of where and what to change is the Registry Settings for Analysis Services document on MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnsql2k/html/sql2k_anservregsettings.asp) [watch out for the link running over several lines, obviously need to make it into a single line).

    A great point to note with this info, is that there are *many* settings that are NOT exposed via the Management Console for AS. They even report incorrectly in the Console if using >3Gb memory (this is way cool, one of our mem settings is > 2-3 Gb in registry, but comes back as a negative number in Console)

    I started writing a management app that used this doc as it's base, but got bored 😛

    Hope it all comes together for you.

    Lastly, re:memory, keep in mind that AS likes toload *everything* (ie cubes & dims) into memory on startup, and VLDM picks up the large guys, so with large cubes, large dims, and lots of float (or even integer) measures, you'll need a fair whack of memory.

    Steve

    Steve.

  • Thank you very much, Steve! I appreciate the extensive info and the link. I will study that article as I was impressed with all of the settings available...however, I will wait until my knowledge of AS catches up to the level of that article before adjusting anything 😉

    Thank you again,

    Michael


    Michael Weiss

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