Essbase Defrag and Calc Issue

Question

I have a calcscript will runs against a BSO cube with 11 dimensions and it runs for 15 mins. The script does some calculations and rollups (AGG and CALC DIMS etc). I can see the blocks go from 15k blocks to 500k blocks at the end.
And then when I re-run the script, it runs for over 2 hours and of course it's due to the block explosions and all. And so, I do a defrag and clear upper blocks by doing a:
CLEARBLOCK UPPER;
CLEARBLOCK EMPTY;
After this the number of blocks goes way down to 25k blocks.
And still the calc continues to run over 2 hours. So my question is why this behavior? Is there anything I can do besides reloading the cube from scratch? I know if I do a complete clear it obviously runs the same timing again. But I want to be able to not have to do that. Is there a step I am missing?

Answer 1

Here are some tips:
- please review "intelligent calculation" - this feature helps when only a few blocks are changed to limit the recalculation to affected blocks
- your index cache may be to low - index has grown with number of blocks beyond your index cache size -> more disk IO than your setup can handle
- overall design needs tuning (block size / density / dynamic calculations / ...) -> contact a consultant
- what is the business case for 10 min calc time limit? Will users wait for calculation to finish?
Sascha.