Azure Analysis Service - Memory Consumption

Question

All,

We are currently hosting Azure Analysis Service (AAS) with S0 pricing tier and this gives us 10GB of RAM. In a On-Prem setup of SQLServer Analysis Service, the engine itself would consume fair amount of RAM and I'm seeing about 1GB of RAM being consumed on the installation that I have on my desktop.

In the case of AAS, the 10GB that is allocated, is it separate from the memory consumed by AAS engine running or is it part of the 10GB that is allocated in which case if it takes 1GB (hypothetically) for the engine to run then we are left with only 9GB?

Thanks,
grajee

Answer 1

Hi @grajee ,

Thanks for your patience.

I discussed with Product team and below are the insights. I created sample instances of Azure Analysis Services (AAS) with S0(10GB RAM) and S1(25GB RAM) configurations and below are the snaps from Metrics dashboard in Azure portal. Yes, the Memory Usage metric (942.4 MB) reflects the memory that memory needed just to start up, initialize, load CLR assemblies, etc. "Memory Limit- High(max)" reflects the Total Memory Limit. The Hard Memory Limit is always equal to the SKU size (e.g. 10 GB for the S0).

What this essentially means is that spikes of memory above 8.6 GB would start to trigger high priority cleaning of memory – it can cause older inactive sessions to be cancelled, so that memory is released. Beyond the Hard Memory Limit, the priority bumps up even further, and even active operations and active sessions can get cancelled.

Hope this helps! Please let us know for further queries and we will be glad to assist.