With the London 2012 Olympics around the corner, there are sure to be reports or rumors of performance-enhancing drug use among some athletes. It turns out that using manufactured chemicals to give yourself an edge is frowned upon in the athletic community.
However, as a SAS user you should avail yourself of any technique that provides a performance advantage, and often this comes in the form of tweaking SAS system options and optimizing the file I/O on your operating system.
These two SAS notes offer specific guidance for the best throughput and speed. These recommendations are backed by solid research from SAS tech support and R&D:
- Usage Note 46954: SAS system option settings for best performance in UNIX and Windows environments - provides specific values to use for certain options. For example, the recommended setting for the MEMSIZE option is 512M.
- Usage Note 42197: A list of papers useful for troubleshooting system performance problems - provides a list of dozens of papers (and growing!) that cover all types of scenarios.
Special hat-tip to my colleague Margaret Crevar (from the SAS R&D Performance Lab) for bringing these notes to my attention. View her recent SAS Talks webinar for more performance best practices.
4 Comments
Any additional information on setting these to higher values where the platform supports it?
For example my MEMSIZE was 2GB.
Bob, yes, more details are in this paper on how to maintain happy SAS users. I think the main message is that there isn't an advantage to giving SAS more memory than it needs, and it can be detrimental when you have multiple simultaneous SAS sessions.
Hi Chris,
Regarding 46954: can we apply these settings in a 9.2 mr3 environment?
Ralf
Ralf, I think the answer is Yes, except for ALIGNSASIOFILES which is new in 9.3. See this paper for more about that option and shared file systems.