Forum Discussion

Tim's avatar
Tim
Data Pipeline
01-20-2025
Solved

Does Sisense free up RAM from crashed queries and builds?

I've been looking at RAM use. While experimenting, I sometimes build bad widgets or cubes that use lots of RAM and then fail with the "abnormal memory consumption" message. That's fine, but I noticed after the RAM use climbs up, it remains high. After the failure, shouldn't Sisense free up the RAM? I want to experiment, and I don't mind hogging server resources while building or querying, but I expect those resources to be released for other users after I cancel or crash.

  • Hi Tim,

    Thank you for reaching out with your question about RAM usage in Sisense. It's great to see you're actively experimenting and exploring the platform's capabilities.

    When a cube build or query consumes a large amount of RAM and subsequently fails, Sisense does not automatically release the RAM immediately. This is because the RAM remains allocated to caching mechanisms for potential reuse, which helps improve performance for subsequent operations.

    If you'd like to free up RAM after a failed or canceled build, the best approach is to stop the specific cube. Stopping the cube releases all cached RAM associated with it, ensuring those resources are available for other users or further experiments.

    To stop a cube, you can follow these steps:

    1. Navigate to the Data tab in the Sisense Web Application.
    2. Locate the specific cube.
    3. Click the Stop option to terminate it.

    Once stopped, you can restart the cube as needed and continue experimenting.

    Please let us know if you have additional questions or need further assistance.

    Best regards,

    Ihor

4 Replies

  • ihoryokhym's avatar
    ihoryokhym
    Sisense Employee

    Hi Tim,

    Thank you for reaching out with your question about RAM usage in Sisense. It's great to see you're actively experimenting and exploring the platform's capabilities.

    When a cube build or query consumes a large amount of RAM and subsequently fails, Sisense does not automatically release the RAM immediately. This is because the RAM remains allocated to caching mechanisms for potential reuse, which helps improve performance for subsequent operations.

    If you'd like to free up RAM after a failed or canceled build, the best approach is to stop the specific cube. Stopping the cube releases all cached RAM associated with it, ensuring those resources are available for other users or further experiments.

    To stop a cube, you can follow these steps:

    1. Navigate to the Data tab in the Sisense Web Application.
    2. Locate the specific cube.
    3. Click the Stop option to terminate it.

    Once stopped, you can restart the cube as needed and continue experimenting.

    Please let us know if you have additional questions or need further assistance.

    Best regards,

    Ihor

    • Tim's avatar
      Tim
      Data Pipeline

      Hi Ihor, ok, I've used stop and restart to free ram before. You say "remains allocated to caching" - does that mean that if another process/cube/query needs RAM, Sisense will deallocate the crashed query from cache to free up space?

      • ihoryokhym's avatar
        ihoryokhym
        Sisense Employee

        Thank you for your follow-up question, Tim! I appreciate your curiosity about how Sisense manages RAM allocation.

        In Sisense, if a cube build or query fails and RAM remains allocated to caching, that memory is typically reserved for performance purposes. However, Sisense does have mechanisms to manage memory dynamically. If another process, cube, or query requires RAM, the system will attempt to deallocate or reassign cached memory to accommodate the new demand.

        That said, the effectiveness of this reallocation depends on overall system usage and configuration. In scenarios where memory pressure is high, manually stopping a failed cube can proactively free up cached RAM and ensure availability for other operations.

        Please let me know if you'd like to dive deeper into this or explore any specific examples!

        Best regards,
        Ihor