Dear Listers,

We're experiencing a memory issue in Analysis Services cube production. The error is reported as :
Analysis Server Error: Memory error [The server computer is running low on memory. Close some applications, and then try again.]

The cube is partitioned and uses a snowflake schema of 15 dimensions with 14 measures. Each partition (4 partitions) houses approx 18 million rows. The cube processing task occasionally completes successfully after a restart of Analysis Services.
The machine is configured with 4Gb RAM and dedicated to Analysis Services although the Windows 2000 OS restricts memory usage to 2Gb per process. As such our configuration setting of Process Buffer has been set to 1664Mb.

Recommended solutions to-date are:

- upgrade to W2K Adv. Server 2000 / 2003 to permit use of 3GB memory
- modify the cube design
- trial combinations of AS config. settings

Has anybody experienced similar memory related processing issues and achieved a successful outcome?

Hi There,

I get this issue from time to time. Considering the size of your cube, an upgrade to Win2000 advanced so that you can activate the 3GB switch will go a long way to address this. The other setting you can play with in AS are the read ahead and process buffer size. Despite what is said about adjusting these can increase processing performance, I have never seen any noticable performance boost as a consequence of using these, so you could choke them back to at or near minimum.

On some of our server, we automaticially restart the server every night which helps. During the day the memory consumed by AS grows due to Query buffer growth. Stoping the service (or restarting the server) clears this buffer and releases memory back to processing. We do this restart just before cube build time.

Hope this helps.

"CITS_DBA" wrote:

May be this is what you really want to do :

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;295443

Hope to help ...
and let us know about it...

Ovidiu

"CITS_DBA" <CITS_DBA (AT) discussions (DOT) microsoft.com> wrote

The cube processing task occasionally completes successfully after a restart
of Analysis Services.
such our configuration setting of Process Buffer has been set to 1664Mb.

Another resource to examine for memory utilization are these three white
papers from the BI Practices Team:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/pro.../anservog.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/pro.../ansvcspg.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/pro.../ansvcs64.mspx
--
Dave Wickert [MSFT]
dwickert (AT) online (DOT) microsoft.com
Program Manager
BI SystemsTeam
SQL BI Product Unit (Analysis Services)
--
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

"CITS_DBA" <CITS_DBA (AT) discussions (DOT) microsoft.com> wrote

The cube processing task occasionally completes successfully after a restart
of Analysis Services.
such our configuration setting of Process Buffer has been set to 1664Mb.