SSAS 2012 High CPU Usage When Processing Cube

Question

Thursday, October 24, 2013 7:09 AM | 1 vote

Hello,
   I have this problem when I process a cube, when the cube has data that is partitioned by month.  Works fine if I'm processing 1 month, but if I process a whole year, then I'm guessing there is a problem with SSAS threading when multiple CPUs need to write to multiple partitions.  I have 12 CPU cores.  If 1 month is processed, then only 1 CPU goes to 100%.  But if I try to load a year or more of data, then all the CPUs go to 100%.
Is there a way to limit how many CPUs SSAS uses?

All replies (3)

Thursday, October 24, 2013 4:21 PM ✅Answered

If you are connected in Object Explorer in Management Studio to your SSAS instance, when you right click on an object and choose Process, you can click the Change Settings button and change the "Maximum number of parallel tasks" setting to some specific number to lower parallelism.

http://artisconsulting.com/Blogs/GregGalloway


Friday, October 25, 2013 2:01 AM ✅Answered

If you are processing via XMLA you can set this by adding a MaxParallel="x" attribute to the <Parallel> element (where x is the number of parallel tasks). Given that you have 12 cores if you are trying to leave head room for other operations you might want to set this to somewhere in the range of 3-6 parallel operations.

This is not a threading "issue" - it is just SSAS doing it's best to use all the resources it has at hand to complete the processing as fast as possible.

http://darren.gosbell.com - please mark correct answers


Monday, October 28, 2013 7:11 AM ✅Answered

Hello,

Please also take a look at the following article, especially the "Parallel Processing Best Practices" section.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc966525.aspx#ECAA

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