Performance-enhancing SAS notes

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.