Optimizations for machine dedicated to processing

Hello,

We have a machine entirely dedicated to processing SSAS 2005 cubes, and then other machines sync from it and provide client access.

I notice that sometimes during processing, the processor usage hovers at about 15% and there is no paging or disk activity, which makes me wonder if SSAS is somehow limiting resources used for processing. Are there any optimizations that can be made to tell SSAS to assume that it doesn't have to serve clients, and can devote all resources to processing? I'm looking specifically at the Thread Pool / Process / Priority Ratio, which it says is an advanced property not to be changed without guidance--could increasing this work?

Thanks for any ideas.

Tom

You should be able to use several tools to monitor what is happening during processing of Analysis Services cubes:

SQL Profiler- will show you trace events
ActivityViewer sample app- will show you current connections, sessions..

Try to see what stage of processing is going slow on your machine. In several cases I have seen Analysis Server sitting and waiting for data to come from relational database.

Processing of partition has several stages:
Read Data , Write Data , Build Index ...

See which part is under suspicion.

I wouldnt go changing advanced sever properties without talking to product support.

Hope that helps.

Edward.
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