Analysis Services 2008 R2 - Compressed Backup and CPU Usage

  • I have a weekly backup job running on my SSAS instance. This uses compression for improved disk performance and reduced storage requirements, but at the expense of CPU. Backup duration is not a major concern for this job, as it runs out of office hours, so I'm looking to reduce the CPU usage and therefore lengthen the duration of the backup job.

    According to Technet () there are a few settings in Analysis Services Properties for processor usage, but most of them related to querying data and processing cubes. For example, the obvious setting would be MaxCPUUsage, but this relates to LazyProcessing, which I suspect doesn't include backup operations.

    The one general CPU setting is CoordinatorExecutionMode, which reduces the number of parallel operations per processor. This in theory should reduce the load on the CPU for the backup job, but I don't want this to have a knock-on effect on the daily running of the instance.

    So, my question is firstly, am I barking up the right tree with the CoordinatorExecutionMode setting, and secondly, can anybody foresee issues with changing this setting before the backup job and reverting afterwards?

    Thanks

  • According to the Analysis Services Operations guide (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/hh226085.aspx) CoordinatorExecutionMode is to do with processing and querying only. It mentions nothing of backup operations.

    According to a quick google search if you backup your DB with powershell and litter the script with sleeps it might limit the amount of CPU it's using, although there is no actual way to limit the CPU usage in powershell.

    See:

    http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1239195/in-windows-powershell-how-can-you-set-the-maximum-cpu-for-the-script-to-use

    and

    https://zakird.com/code/2011/06/20/backing-up-analysis-services-in-powershell/


    I'm on LinkedIn

  • Great, thanks for the replying and providing additional reading.

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