Essbase Performance Improvement: Basic tips

Recently we installed EPM 11.1.2.1 on a spanking new server having Windows 2008 R2. Although, the first question would be why 11.1.2.1 and why 2008 R2 in this age of 2.4 ? we must understand that money makes the world go round and there are clients who don't feel the need to upgrade unless it is absolutely necessary.

Things looked good initially, but soon we found that there are some serious performance issues with the new Essbase server. Following are the areas we attacked to improve its performance.

Server power mode should be set to High-Performance: 

A text data export was taking around 30 minutes on the new server (on old ones, the exact file would export in 4 minutes). Changing the power mode from balanced to High power, reduced it to 22 minutes. Still pretty slow.

Priority of ESSSVR process set to 'Below Normal'

This is still a mystery, but we are still trying to figure out why ESSSVR would spawn in 'Below Normal' priority. An SR with Oracle didn't yield expected results.
We then checked the automated script which starts Essbase upon server startup. By default, all tasks started in Windows 2008 are started on 'Below Normal' priority. We have to manually export the task's XML file, increase the priority and set it to 'Normal'.

Drive Speed

The disk write speed on which the app folder is was abysmal. We changed to folder location in Essbase to another volume, which is a SAN drive. It is pretty much faster than the drive attached to the server.

RAM increased

From 32 GB, the RAM was increased to 128 GB. There is a lot of free memory available now.

MEMSCALINGFACTOR

This is one secret weapon most of us ignore. This parameter increases the allocated RAM for Data Cache, Index Cache and Data File Cache beyond the maximum value of 4 GB that can be set through EAS console.

These things have brought the new server at par with the old one, infact, in certain cases it outshines the older one by a good margin.

Cheers !
NJ