Microsoft OLAP and Analysis Services - Monitoring

[dfusion]

Our company is using Microsoft OLAP and Analysis services to deliver a 'product' over the web to our customers. Currently, there are four web servers in our DMZ, load balanced by a Foundry Server Iron, and these web machines communicate with two Proclarity servers and several OLAP servers in the LAN. The OLAP servers talk to two Microsoft SQL Servers to get their data.

The complaint, coming from the developers and OLAP engineers, is that the inital query a customer makes is taking way too long. After the initial query, all other queries are much faster. Sounds like the server is caching information. However, when I sniffed communication from one web server to one OLAP server, there are tons of frozen windows! Although the initial query takes a while, I'm thinking performance can be increased by tuning the application. The web servers are 100TX and the OLAP and SQL servers are Gigabit. I don't think bandwidth is the issue. I think the problem is higher up in the OSI, but I don't know how to verify this. I've never worked with OLAP or Proclarity before.

Has anyone encountered an environment like this?

Regards,
Mark
Sr. Network Engineer
ArcLight Systems, LLC

http://www.markholloway.com

 

[fortunat]

Frozen windows may not be a bad thing. I would be concerned if the Window was frozen and it was less than 2x your MSS, or a zero value.

I've already written up something on it @:

http://www.thetechfirm.com/fluke_networks/tcp_window_frozen.ppt

Even though it's in my Fluke section, it still applies.

Hope that helps

'Making things work better; bit by bit.'