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Understanding Analysis Services Memory Behavior

Shabnam Watson walks us through SQL Server Analysis Services memory settings and application behavior under memory stress:


If memory consumption is below the Low limit everything is fine and it is free to stay in memory. Once the consumption passes the Low limit a cleaner thread wakes up and tries to clean up memory. At this point price of memory is no longer zero. It starts from 2 at the Low limit and goes as high as 1000 when memory consumption reaches the Total limit. The higher the memory pressure the more aggressive the cleaner gets. Once memory consumption reaches the Hard limit all connections/sessions are closed and queries are cancelled with an out of memory error.

This is a thorough explanation with some good demos and terrible queries.  Give it a read.