Analysis Services 2005 - Performance

Counter Guidance

Traditionally we have shied away from noting specific values or thresholds that
are indicative of good or bad performance. One reason for this is because
coming up with good values is quite hard to do, and people sometimes see that a
particular value is outside of some threshold and become fixated on that being
the issue when in reality it may not be. For example, the Windows NT Resource
Kit had a section that stated that a disk queue length greater than two to three
times the number of disk spindles was indicative of a performance problem.
When working with SQL Server this is not always true, especially if read ahead
activity is driving the disk queue length. Just because there is a queue waiting for
IO does not necessarily mean that SQL Server is stalled waiting for the IO to
complete. We have seen disk queue lengths up in the 20-30 range (on much
fewer than 10 disks) where SQL Server performance was just fine.

However, in the absence of specific values people sometimes look at

Performance Monitor data and fail to spot interesting trends. So despite the
hesitation to provide any specific values, we will attempt to note some
thresholds where a given counter starts to attract the interest of those
who have been working some of these cases over the past several
years. Hopefully this will provide you some guidance in things that
stand out. But ultimately, you will need to look for other counters that
also seem out of range so that you can start developing a pattern of
indicators that point to a particular type of problem.

It should be fairly easy for you to visually identify a counter whose value
changed substantially during a problematic time period. Quite often you will find
that there are many counters that changed significantly. With a blocking
problem, for example, you might see user connections, lock waits and lock wait
time all increase while batch requests/sec decreases. If you focused solely on
a particular counter (or a few counters) you might come to some very
different conclusions about what the problem is, and you could very
likely be wrong. Some of the changes in counter values are the cause of the
original problem, whereas others are just side affects from that problem.

In the ideal situation, the change in the counters that indicate the
cause of the problem should lead the counters showing the affect, but
due to the granularity used to capture Performance Monitor data some
of these distinctions can be lost. If you collect data once every 15 seconds
and the problem was of quick onset, it can be hard to figure out if user
connections went up first and then lock timeouts, or vice versa. This is where
you have to use other available information, such as other performance
counters, the customer’s description of the problem, etc, to form a theory as to
 what you think may be wrong and then look for other supporting data to prove or
disprove your theory.

The most important counters are in blue.

It is recommended to save the counters to a CSV file or a SQL Server database.

The sample rate should be every 15 seconds.

This is the list of the SQL Server counters only. Please also use the Windows
Server Performance Counters.

SSAS Query Counters

Object Counter Preferred Description
Value

MSAS Memory Limit Low KB See Displays the Memory\LowMemoryLimit

2005:Memory description from the configuration file

MSAS Memory Limit High KB See Displays the Memory\TotalMemoryLimit

2005:Memory description from the configuration file.
MSAS Memory Usage KB Displays the memory usage of the server
2005:Memory process. This is the value that is compared
to Memory\LowMemoryLimit and
Memory\TotalMemoryLimit.
Note that the value of this performance
counter is the same value displayed by the
Process\Private Bytes performance counter.
MSAS Cleaner Balance/sec around 2 Shows how many times the current memory
2005:Memory usage is compared against the settings.
Memory usage is checked every 500ms, so
the counter will trend towards 2 with slight
deviations when the system is under high
stress.
MSAS Cleaner Memory Displays the amount of memory, in KB, not
2005:Memory nonshrinkable KB subject to purging by the background
cleaner.
MSAS Cleaner Memory Displays the amount of memory, in KB,
2005:Memory shrinkable KB subject to purging by the background
cleaner.
MSAS Cleaner Memory KB Displays the amount of memory, in KB,
2005:Memory known to the background cleaner. (Cleaner
memory shrinkable + Cleaner memory non-
shrinkable.) Note that this counter is
calculated from internal accounting
 information so there may be some small
deviation from the memory reported by the
operating system.
MSAS AggCacheKB Current memory allocated to filestore (file
2005:Memory cache), in KB.

MSAS FileStoreKB Current memory allocated to filestore (file

2005:Memory cache), in KB.

MSAS in-memory dimension Current in-memory dimension index (hash)

2005:Memory index (hash) file KB file KB.

MSAS in-memory dimension Current in-memory dimension property file

2005:Memory property file KB KB.

MSAS in-memory dimension Current in-memory dimension string file KB

2005:Memory string file KB

MSAS in-memory fact Current in-memory fact aggregation file KB

2005:Memory aggregation file KB

MSAS in-memory fact data file Current in-memory fact data file KB
2005:Memory KB

MSAS 2005: Queries from Cache Direct Rate of queries answered from cache
Storage Engine / sec directly.
Query Find the ratio between (Queries from cache
direct + Queries from Cache Filtered ) /
Queries from file
MSAS 2005: Queries from Cache Rate of queries answered by filtering
Storage Engine Filtered / Sec existing cache entry.
Query Find the ratio between (Queries from cache
direct + Queries from Cache Filtered ) /
Queries from file
MSAS 2005: Queries from File / Sec Rate of queries answered from files.
Storage Engine Find the ratio between (Queries from cache
Query direct + Queries from Cache Filtered ) /
Queries from file
MSAS 2005: Direct hits / Sec Rate of cache direct hits. Queries were
Cache answered from an existing cache entry.

MSAS 2005: Lookups / Sec Rate of cache lookups.

Cache

MSAS 2005: Direct Hit Ratio Ratio of cache direct hits to cache lookups,
Cache for the period between obtaining counter
values.
MSAS 2005: Current connections Current number of client connections
Connection established (usually equal to the number of
User Sessions)
Process IO Read Bytes/sec
(msmdsrv)

MSAS 2005: Current Latch Waits Current number of threads waiting for a
Locks latch. These are latch requests that could
not be given immediate grants and are in a
wait state.
MSAS 2005: Current Lock Waits Current number of clients waiting for a lock.
Locks

MSAS 2005: Query Pool job queue Number of jobs in the queue of the query
Threads Length thread pool.
Processing Counters
Object Counter Preferred Description
Value

MSAS 2005:Proc Temp file bytes temporary files used during processing
Aggregations written/sec

MSAS 2005:Proc Temp file rows written/sec temporary files used during processing
Aggregations
MSAS 2005:Proc Rows coverted/sec
Aggregations

MASAS 2005: Rows read/sec

Processing

MASAS 2005: Rows written/sec

Processing