Process Cube

I have a cube with one customer count measure that use DistinctCount Aggregate Function. My testing Environment is Window Server 2003 x64 Sp1, 300 GB of Ram, and SQL 2005 EE. When I full process the cube, I use the MS Performance tool to monitor the MSAS:Proc Aggregations. I find out the Temp file bytes written/sec has been used, but the usage of the RAM never go above 15 GB. Why the temp file still in use. When I use AS2000 I know I can adjust the Process Buffer size to avoid the use of Temp file to increase the process performance. Should I take the same action in AS2005. But my OLAP\Process\BufferMemoryLimit has been set to 60 => 180GB can be use. Why temp file still in use? Should I adjust the OLAP\ProcessPlan\DistinctBuffer too that is the new item in AS2005?

Analysis Services 2005 is quite different in the way it does processing and manages memory.

First I would recommend you look at the performance guide for some clues on how to improve processing performance. I also not sure what the real concern is: is that your are seeing Analysis Server using less memory during processing? Is that you compare AS2000 and AS2005 and you are seeing slower processing performance?

Just to note, and you might know it alreday, processing of distinct count partitions is quite different from processing of regular partitions. Same goes for querying. Records stored in distinct count partitions as stored sorted. You can even see that for processing such partition Analysis Server will send different SQL query, it will ask data from SQL Server to come in sorted order.
What I am getting at is processing and querying of distinct count partitions is quite different from regular partitions. If you wanted to optimize processing and query performance the first and most important is to make sure your partition your cube along dimension that you get your distinct count for.

Edward.
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|||my concern is how the memory usage in AS2005. Since my server has 300GB of memory, but AS2005 doesn't use up all the memory during the process, instead it use the Temp file that can slow down the process performance.